Anne Spencer Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

This you may do:
Lock your heart, then, quietly,
And lest they peer within,
Light no lamp when dark comes down
Raise no shade for sun;
Breathless must your breath come through
If you'd die and dare deny
The gods their god-like fun.

Anne Spencer
We trekked into a far country,
My friend and I.
Our deeper content was never spoken,
But each knew all the other said.

Anne Spencer
Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth and sea. Black men are most men; but the white are free! White things are rare things so rare, so rare They stole from out a silvered world—somewhere.

Anne Spencer
Lady, Lady, I saw your hands,
Twisted, awry, like crumpled roots,
Bleached poor white in a sudsy tub,
Wrinkled and drawn from your rub-a-dub.
Lady, Lady, I saw your heart,
And altered there in its darksome place,
Were the tongues of flames the ancients knew,
Where the good God sits to spangle through.

Anne Spencer
Once the world was young
For I was twenty and very old
And you and I knew all the answers
What the day was, how the hours would turn
One dial was there to see
Now the world is old and I am still young
For the young know nothing, nothing.

Anne Spencer
I know you—a glance, and what you are
Sits-by-the-fire in my heart.
My Limousine-Lady knows you, or
Why does the slant-envy of her eye mark
Your straight air and radiant inclusive smile?
Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adoring.

Anne Spencer