"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?"

"What happens to a dream deferred? Daddy, ain’t you heard?"

"Why should it be my loneliness, Why should it be my song, Why should it be my dream deferred overlong?"

"Good evening, daddy I know you’ve heard The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred"

"When you turn the corner And you run into yourself Then you know that you have turned All the corners that are left."

"My motto, As I live and learn, is: Dig And Be Dug In Return."

"For poems are like rainbows; they escape you quickly."

"You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word “Negro” is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown. My father was a darker brown. My mother an olive-yellow."

"Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers, The mountains and the endless plain — All, all the stretch of these great green states — And make America again!"

"O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath — America will be!"

"Sure, call me any ugly name you choose — The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!"

"O, let America be America again — The land that never has been yet — And yet must be — the land where every man is free."

"For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay — Except the dream that's almost dead today."

"O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe."

"Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above."

"Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be."

"If I were marooned on a desert island...I would miss...Jackie Ormes's cute drawings"

"Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it."

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

"I was so sick last night I Didn't hardly know my mind. So sick last night I Didn't know my mind. I drunk some bad licker that Almost made me blind."

"Hold fast to dreams For if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly."

"While over Alabama earth These words are gently spoken: Serve — and hate will die unborn. Love — and chains are broken."

"Love is a naked shadow On a gnarled and naked tree."

"Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) They hung my black young lover To a cross roads tree."

"The stars went out and so did the moon. The singer stopped playing and went to bed While the Weary Blues echoed through his head. He slept like a rock or a man that's dead."

"I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers."

"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."

"The night is beautiful, So are the faces of my people."

"They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed — I, too, am America."

"I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong."

"A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists."

"Your tenderness and terrorization, your prose sentences — like Bernini graves, staggeringly expensive, Italianate, warm, sentences once-and-for-all."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other"

"Randall had a great flair for the poetry of desperation."

"His dogmatism is more wild and personal than we are accustomed to, completely unspoiled by the hedging "equanimity" that weakens the style and temperament of so many of our serious writers. His murderous intuitive phrases are famous; but at the same time his mind is essentially conservative and takes as much joy in rescuing the reputation of a sleeping good writer as in chloroforming a mediocre one."

"His multiple and eclectic virtues — originality, erudition, wit, probity, and an irresistible passion — combined to make him the best American poet-critic since Eliot. Or one could call him, after granting Eliot the English citizenship he so actively embraced, the best poet-critic we have ever had. Whichever side of the Atlantic one chooses to place Eliot, Jarrell was his superior in at least one significant respect. He captured a world that any contemporary poet will recognize as "the poetry scene"; his Poetry and the Age might even now be retitled Poetry and Our Age."

"What he could do in poetry he did early and with prodigious security; he was one of our true poets for thirty years and practically the only American poet able to cope with the Second Great War; many of us both younger and older would acknowledge him as a master in one degree or another. It was this gift of true pitch that made his teaching voice, his critical voice, as penetrating as it was."

"Jarrell was a lovable person. He was a very pleasant experience... the weekend that I was at Women's College; but I couldn't exactly call him an influence. It was a very, very intense four days during which I learned much about myself... less so about him. But there's a great deal about him that I respect and much for which I felt sorry. He had the flavor of someone who had retreated, who had performed a final action."

"Jarrell's stylistic particularities have been hard for critics to hear and describe, both because the poems call readers' attention instead to their characters and because Jarrell's particular powers emerge so often from mimesis of speech. Jarrell's style responds to the alienations it delineates by incorporating or troping speech and conversation, linking emotional events within one person's psyche to speech acts that might take place between persons … Jarrell's style pivots on his sense of loneliness and on the intersubjectivity he sought as a response."

"To have your poems criticized by Jarrell — when they didn't please him — was like meeting your fate, like a foretaste of death. To go with his daunting judgement, he had an unlimited stock of images for catching exactly each poet's inadequacies, so that their predicaments were far more vividly expressed than anything they themselves had written. Jarrell made literature out of their failure to make it."

"You often feel about something in Shakespeare or Dostoevsky that nobody ever said such a thing, but it's just the sort of thing people would say if they could — is more real, in some sense, than what people do say. If you have given your imagination free rein, let things go as far as they want to go, the world they made for themselves while you watched can have, for you and later watchers, a spontaneous finality."

"...a poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it..."

"If we judge by wealth and power, our times are the best of times; if the times have made us willing to judge by wealth and power, they are the worst of times."

"The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks."

"When you call people we you find it easy to be unfair to them, since you yourself are included in the condemnation."

"If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus."