It is brave to be involved.
Surely--But I am very off from that. From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrow that was my clean naivete and my faith. This morning, men deliver wounds and death. They will deliver death and wounds tomorrow. And I doubt all. You. Or a violet.
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
Poetry is life distilled.
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical disguise.
Truth And if sun comes How shall we greet him? Shall we not dread him, Shall we not fear him After so lengthy a Session with shade? Though we have wept for him, Though we have prayed All through the night-yearsβ What if we wake one shimmering morning to Hear the fierce hammering Of his firm knuckles Hard on the door? Shall we not shudder?β Shall we not flee Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter Of the familiar Propitious haze? Sweet is it, sweet is it To sleep in the coolness Of snug unawareness. The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.
Writing is a delicious agony.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.
Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.
First fight. Then fiddle.
What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.
A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
