Harlem Renaissance Quotes

I think there's some great stuff coming. I do feel that. I think we have reached our Harlem Renaissance.

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

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

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 do we call our Harlem Renaissance? Maybe in the future, it won't be just Latino, maybe it'll be more multi-multi, because, you know, people are such fusions now, of so many different cultures.

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.

Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were. In fact, until the past ten years, many defined the period primarily by its well-known literary, musical, and artistic elements while overlooking the fact there was any political component to it at all.

When peoples care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.

Eric Walrond, handsome, cosmopolitan, and beguilingly enigmatic, may have been the most promising literary talent of the Harlem Renaissance.... James Davis's finely written, beautifully paced Eric Walrond is a major biography of a fascinating figure.

From the small clubs of the Harlem Renaissance where he began playing saxophone to world tours for the biggest of the big bands, Benny Carter redefined American jazz. From the start, his fellow musicians said the way he played the sax was amazing. They say that about me, too. (Laughter.) But I don't think they mean it in quite the same way.

I am particularly conscious of my connection to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance because I, too, am a Black poet, born into, and shaped by, the very community in which those poets of the past produced so much of the work we associate with the Harlem Renaissance. We speak from the same place, both literally and metaphorically.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eyeing the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.

Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.

Like a welcome summer rain, humor may suddenly cleanse and cool the earth, the air and you.

When I think of the Harlem Renaissance, I think of bright colors, and bold, dynamic art. African American artists of the period were, in large measure, breaking out of the constrictions white society had set for them. They were claiming and remaking their own images, and doing so in bold and striking ways.

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.

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

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? ... Or does it explode?