Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

Those that don’t got it, can’t show it. Those that got it, can’t hide it.

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.

There is something about poverty that smells like death.

It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.

Love, I find, is like singing. Everybody can do enough to satisfy themselves, though it may not impress the neighbors as being very much.

I do not weep at the world I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.