Black Poet Quotes

#1. So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

Diane Wakoski

#2. Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.

Frantz Fanon

#3. It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.

Henry Louis Gates

#4. I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet
buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture
than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Mary Karr

#5. Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

Cristina Garcia

#6. Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth's inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light.

Audre Lorde

#7. A consumer-finance agency is a good thing, but it would do well to teach consumers a simple lesson: if you don't understand the deal you're making, don't make it.

James Surowiecki

#8. The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Robert Morgan

#9. Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black?

Jay Asher

#10. I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

Lucille Clifton

#11. The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That's the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

Anna Kamienska

#12. Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Ayn Rand

#13. I proved to you that psychiatry is an exact science!"
"An exact science?!"
"Yes, you owe me exactly one hundred and forty-three dollars!

Charles M. Schulz

#14. I think people do things all the time in the name of love that they shouldn't be doing - such is the nature of us.

Jodi Picoult

#15. The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

Jonathan Lethem

#16. After I have taught you the ancient arts, you will be able to see the past much better than any movie.

Stephen Boston

#17. Perhaps ... I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself
a Black woman warrior poet doing my work
come to ask you, are you doing yours?

Audre Lorde

#18. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Audre Lorde

#19. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

Countee Cullen

#20. Paint in blue and black ... sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...

John Geddes

#21. Four days. And she had two gay sons, a large black mother, a demented poet for a friend and was considering getting a duck. It was not what she'd expected from this visit.

Louise Penny

#22. Point me to 50 people online who think I'm super sexy. I'll point you to 50 more who say he's old and looks like my dad.

Jon Hamm

#23. Spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is nature's joke, and therefore literature's. True prudence limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal and real world.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#24. Customer service is not a department, it's everyone's job.

Ken Blanchard

#25. When I'm zoomed in on my fear, I can't see the faithfulness of God and the steadfastness of His covenant.

Raechel Myers

#26. Who could imagine a poet wearing anything other than black?

Ann Demeulemeester

#27. History does influence our lives - every moment. We never sort of live our lives in a linear fashion. We always have these memories and these images from our past that sometimes we're not even aware of, and they sort of shape who we are.

Dinaw Mengestu

#28. Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.

Kwame Dawes

#29. Whose starboard eye
Saw chariot 'swing low'?

James Weldon Johnson

#30. I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man ... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]

Ernest Hemingway,

#31. I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness. I consider myself neither poet, composer, or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation.

Gil Scott-Heron

#32. Black is not sad. Bright colors are what depresses me. They're so ... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not.

Ann Demeulemeester

#33. I have got pictures all around the rooms I sit in. I have got a very mad picture of a dog standing on a black thing on a piece of rope. It was drawn and painted by a Romanian poet who was under house arrest, and it is terrific.

Jennifer Johnston

#34. There is not a thing as the wrong place, or the wrong time. We are where we are at the only time we have. Perhaps it's where we're meant to be.

Shashi Tharoor

#35. In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I'm very much a jazz poet.

Jayne Cortez

#36. I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

Audre Lorde

#37. My office doubles as a karaoke den for the neighborhood. There are strobe lights and Rock Band plastic guitars, a disco ball and a fog machine and some other things. I have a really long work day, and you might find me doing karaoke by myself late at night.

Jeff Kinney