Quotes from The Collected Poems

Langston Hughes ·  736 pages

Rating: (14.6K votes)


Harlem

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, quote from The Collected Poems


“Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that can not fly.

Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only Heaven.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“America is a dream.
The poet says it was promises.
The people say it is promises—that will come true.
The people do not always say things out loud,
Nor write them down on paper.
The people often hold
Great thoughts in their deepest hearts
And sometimes only blunderingly express them,
Haltingly and stumbling say them,
And faultily put them into practice.
The people do not always understand each other.
But there is, somewhere there,
Always the trying to understand,
And the trying to say,
"You are a man. Together we are building our land.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“Gather up In the arms of your love—Those who expect No love from above.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems



“I wish the rent Was heaven sent.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“7 x 7 + love = An amount Infinitely above: 7 x 7 - love.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“The past has been a mint Of blood and sorrow. That must not be True of tomorrow.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“Life dosent frighten me at all.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


“Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems



“Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.”
― Langston Hughes, quote from The Collected Poems


About the author

Langston Hughes
Born place: in Joplin, Missouri, The United States
Born date February 1, 1902
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“It is not now raining.” Inspired by his extreme verbal parsimony, his fellow students at St. John’s invented a unit of measurement for the number of words that a person might utter in conversation, christening the minimum rate one “Dirac”—one word per hour.”
― Steve Silberman, quote from NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity


“Don’t hide who you are, Dee. One thing I have learned is you never hide who you are. If you want something, you fight for it. When you think you have fought hard enough, fight a little more. Don’t ever let anyone or any situation make who you are.”
― Harper Sloan, quote from Corps Security: The Series


“I felt a strange sense of pride, being able to claim her this way. Kind of Neanderthal of me, but there it was.”
― Stephenie Meyer, quote from Twilight / Life and Death


“You're too strong, too opinionated, to just let yourself go with the first offer. You deserve more. You deserve to have them lined up in front of you.”
― Richelle Mead, quote from The Glittering Court


“Hearthstone snapped his fingers for attention. I'm glad too, he signed. He patted the bag of runes at his belt. Stupid cages were magic-proof. Blitzen was crying a lot.
"I was not," Blitzen protested, signing along. "You were."
I was not, Hearthstone said. You were.
At that point, the ASL conversation deteriorated into the two of them poking each other in the chest.”
― Rick Riordan, quote from The Ship of the Dead


Interesting books

Dance Dance Dance
(52.3K)
Dance Dance Dance
by Haruki Murakami
Shadow's Edge
(75.3K)
Shadow's Edge
by Brent Weeks
From Hell
(28K)
From Hell
by Alan Moore
Code Name Verity
(72.9K)
Code Name Verity
by Elizabeth Wein
Eon: Dragoneye Reborn
(49.6K)
Eon: Dragoneye Rebor...
by Alison Goodman
Wake
(73.5K)
Wake
by Lisa McMann

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.