Langston Hughes - Life Quotes

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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
Jazz to me is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

Langston Hughes
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

Langston Hughes
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records — Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.

Langston Hughes
Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

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

Langston Hughes
No matter how belligerent or lewd their talk was, or how sordid the tales they told—of dangerous pleasures and strange perversities—these black men laughed.... No matter how hard life might be, it was not without laughter.

Langston Hughes
Life is a big sea full of many fish. I let down my nets and pulled. I'm still pulling.

Langston Hughes
Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end. Nobody ever cried in my grandmother's stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying. When my grandmother died, I didn't cry, either. Something about my grandmother's stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything."

Langston Hughes