Quotes from The Collected Poems

“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

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Popular quotes

“Pensa all’asimmetria. Questo è un mondo, pensa, in cui puoi startene a letto a sentire una canzone mentre sogni la persona che ami, e i tuoi sentimenti e la canzone si fanno eco a vicenda in modo così potente e completo che sembra impossibile che l’amata, chiunque e ovunque sia, non se ne accorga, non riceva il segnale che pulsa dal tuo cuore, come se tu e la musica e l’amore e tutto l’universo siate fusi in un’unica forza che può essere incanalata verso l’esterno, nell’oscurità, per portargli il messaggio. Ma nella realtà, non solo lei o lui non sapranno nulla, ma non c’è neanche qualcosa che impedisca a quell’altra persona di starsene a letto esattamente nello stesso momento a sentire esattamente la stessa canzone e pensare a qualcun altro - di indirizzare gli stessi sentimenti in una direzione del tutto differente, verso una persona completamente diversa, che a sua volta potrebbe starsene nel buio a pensare a un’altra persona, una quarta, che a sua volta pensa a una quinta, e così via all’infinito; e dunque, invece di un mondo di coppie che si ricambiano precisamente, dove l’innamorato e colei o colui che lo corrisponde solcano lo spazio in modo preciso e meraviglioso come tante paia di ali di farfalla, ci ritroviamo una catena di struggimenti, che si espande e si avvita su se stessa e finisce in un numero infinito di vicoli ciechi.”
― Paul Murray, quote from Skippy Dies

“Sometimes being a good mother gets in the way of being a good person.”
― quote from A Woman of Independent Means

“Any day that starts off in a demon-filled bar in a casino designed to look like Hell isn't likely to turn out well.”
― Karen Chance, quote from Claimed By Shadow

“Great, Kelly thought, a knot of fear tightening her stomach. A mugger with a taste for Shakespeare. This could only happen in Cental Park.”
― Lesley Livingston, quote from Darklight

“All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.”
― Jared Diamond, quote from Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

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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.

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