Langston Hughes Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Langston Hughes
I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore —
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over —
like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes
Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

Langston Hughes
Politics can be the graveyard of the poet. And only poetry can be his resurrection.

Langston Hughes
Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat.

Langston Hughes
These feet have walked ten thousand miles working for white folks and another ten thousand keeping up with colored.

Langston Hughes
It was the period when the Negro was in vogue.

Langston Hughes
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.

Langston Hughes
For my best poems were all written when I felt the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything.

Langston Hughes
Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

Langston Hughes
Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.

Langston Hughes
Teach us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth because I do not want it to fall on me-nor Thee-nor anybody living. Amen!

Langston Hughes
Both of them were very good and kind - the one who went to church and the one who didn't. And no doubt from them I learned to like both Christians and sinners equally well.

Langston Hughes
Wear it
Like a banner
For the proud —
Not like a shroud.

Langston Hughes
You talk like they
don't kick dreams
around downtown.

Langston Hughes
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light He did a lazy sway.
He did a lazy sway.
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.

Langston Hughes
To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Langston Hughes
I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

Langston Hughes
Negro blood is sure powerful — because just onedrop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop—you are a Negro!... Black is powerful.

Langston Hughes
Listen, Christ,
You did alright in your day, I reckon—
But that day's gone now.
They ghosted you up a swell story, too,
Called it Bible —
But it's dead now.

Langston Hughes
My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

Langston Hughes
You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word Negro is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow.

Langston Hughes
I asked you, baby, If you understood- You told me that you didn't, But you thought you would.

Langston Hughes
The only way to get a thing done is to start to do it, then keep on doing it, and finally you'll finish it,....

Langston Hughes
The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negro had but few pegs to fall.

Langston Hughes
Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

Langston Hughes
Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.

Langston Hughes
I have been worrying as long as I have been black. Since I have to be black a long time yet, what is the sense of so much worriation?

Langston Hughes
When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself

Langston Hughes