Countee Quotes

#1. Man dreams that he is more than a leaf on a tree.'
-Leaves by Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen

#2. If You Should Go
Love, leave me like the light,
The gently passing day;
We would not know, but for the night,
When it has slipped away.
Go quietly; a dream,
When done, should leave no trace
That it has lived, except a gleam
Across the dreamer's face.

Countee Cullen

#3. I cut my teeth as the black raccoon
For implements of battle.

Countee Cullen

#4. All day long and all night through, One thing only must I do: Quench my pride and cool my blood, Lest I perish in the flood.

Countee Cullen

#5. I was reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage.

Countee Cullen

#6. For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.

Countee Cullen

#7. Give but a grain of the heart's rich seed, Confine some under cover, And when love goes, bid him God-speed. And find another lover.

Countee Cullen

#8. Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black.

Countee Cullen

#9. My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me

Countee Cullen

#10. The loss of love is a terrible thing; They lie who say that death is worse.

Countee Cullen

#11. We shall not always plant while others reap

Countee Cullen

#12. Dame Poverty gave me my name,
And Pain godfathered me.

Countee Cullen

#13. What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?

Countee Cullen

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

Countee Cullen

#15. What is last year's snow to me,
Last year's anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set

Countee Cullen

#16. Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
Daring even to give You
Dark despairing features

Countee Cullen

#17. If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

Countee Cullen

#18. In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.

Countee Cullen

#19. And if I please you so, my lover,
Remember praise is comely.

Countee Cullen

#20. Whatever lives is granted breath But by the grace and sufferance of Death.

Countee Cullen

#21. I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind

Countee Cullen

#22. Death cut the strings that gave me life,
And handed me to Sorrow,
The only kind of middle wife
My folks could beg or borrow.

Countee Cullen

#23. Not for myself I make this prayer, But for this race of mine That stretches forth from shadowed places Dark hands for bread and wine.

Countee Cullen

#24. The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars, is no less lovely being dark

Countee Cullen

#25. Never love with all your heart, It only ends in aching.

Countee Cullen

#26. The truth is ... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

Countee Cullen

#27. We were not made to eternally weep.

Countee Cullen

#28. There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.

Countee Cullen

#29. [W]e have always resented the natural inclination of most white people to demand spirituals the moment it is known that a Negro is about to sing. So often the request has seemed to savor of the feeling that we could do this and this alone.

Countee Cullen

#30. I have a rendezvous with life.

Countee Cullen

#31. Your love to me was like an unread book.

Countee Cullen

#32. So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

Countee Cullen

#33. The key to all strange things is in thy heart ... / My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.

Countee Cullen