Langston Hughes: Trending quotes

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Langston Hughes: 158 quotes22 likes

“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

“Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.”

Langston Hughes

Source: Selected Poems

“I stay cool, and dig all jive,
That's the way I stay alive.
My motto,
as I live and learn,
is
Dig and be dug
In return.”

Langston Hughes

"Motto"
Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Variant: My motto,
As I live and learn,
is:
Dig And Be Dug
In Return.

“So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love--
But for livin' I was born.”

Langston Hughes

Source: Selected Poems

“I swear to the Lord
I still can't see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.”

Langston Hughes

"The Black Man Speaks," from Jim Crow's Last Stand (1943)

“To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only Heaven.”

Langston Hughes

Source: The Collected Poems

“I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

Langston Hughes

"The Negro Speaks of Rivers," from The Weary Blues (1926)

“Gather out of star-dust,
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust,
Not for sale.”

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

Source: The Big Sea

“Out of love,
No regrets--
Though the goodness
Be wasted forever.

Out of love,
No regrets--
Though the return
Be never.”

Langston Hughes

Source: Selected Poems

“An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose”

Langston Hughes

“Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.”

Langston Hughes

“Believing everything she read
In the daily news,
(No in-between to choose)
She thought that only
One side won,
Not that BOTH
Might lose.”

Langston Hughes

“I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.”

Langston Hughes

Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)
Context: I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I’m dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.

“How still,
How strangely still
The water is today,
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.

~ "Sea Calm”

Langston Hughes