Langston Hughes Quotes

“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.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”
― Langston Hughes

“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

“if you’re going to use the word ‘dream’ in a poem, you had better be langston hughes.”
― Jewelle Gomez

“When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.”
― Harry Belafonte

“What right has anyone to say
That I
Must throw out pieces of my heart
For pay?”
― Langston Hughes, The Collected Poems

“I am that rose that grew from concrete, I am the ENTIRE mother to son Langston Hughes poem. And I'm still climbing...”
― Jaha Knight

“The man was high yellow
In public, afraid of himself, pretending his music
Was material when in fact, it was the opposite:
Like a breath that comes so quickly you know
You’re breathing ether: either atmospheric
And anonymous as the air against a window,
Or indefinite & mute as a curtain of wind.”
― Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

“About the time I was 17 and graduated from high school, I went to Harlem, and that was a most beautiful place where, fortunately for me, I came into, or rather, ran into, the hands of some wonderful people, people who formed an important part of the so-called Black Renaissance. They were people like Langston Hughes, Wally Thurmond, Bud Fisher, all really wonderful writers. I lived in the YMCA where you could rent a room for $2 a week and they put all the regular inhabitants up on the 11th floor. Among them were people like Charlie Drew, who became the developer of blood plasma, distinguished physicians, physics people, and biologists.”
― Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“To You''

To sit and dream, to sit and read,
To sit and learn about the world
Outside our world of here and now
–
Our problem world–
To dream of vast horizons of the
soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered free–help me!
All you who are dreamers too.
Help me to make
Our world anew,
I reach out my dreams to you.”
― Langston Hughes

“Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1902, in Joplin, Missouri. He said he wrote most of his poetry when he was sad and, judging by all the poems he wrote, he must have been sad a lot of the time. I think what made him sad was how people, especially people of color, were treated.”
― Willie Perdomo, Visiting Langston