Or maybe watching you enjoy a carefree summer while you fell in love was what kept me out of the hospital in the first place.
Art is animated by invisible forces that rule the universe.
The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilizations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negri-tude, for it will be without the savor of humanity.
The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life.
I have always taken care to put an idea or emotion behind my words. I have made it a habit to be suspicious of the mere music of words.
What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light.
Let us listen to the voices of our Forebears. . . In the smoky cabin, souls that wish us well are murmuring.
There are all kinds of under-represented groups in the literary establishment.
The only real form of pollution is people. Any ecological system which does not include the reduction or stopping of growth of the population is eyewash
The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
…all things created have an order in themselves, and this begets the form that lets the universe resemble God.