Yet do I marvel at this curious thing; To make a poet black, and bid him sing.
More Quotes from Countee Cullen:
My mother's life is puritan,No hint of cavalier,
A pool so calm you're sure it can
Have little depth to fear.
Countee Cullen
Dead men alone are satiate;
They sleep and dream and have no weight,
To curb their rest, of love or hate.
Countee Cullen
And yet my father's eyes can boast
How full his life has been;
There haunts them yet the languid ghost
Of some still sacred sin.
Countee Cullen
We have always resented the natural inclination of most white people to demand spirituals the moment it is known that a Negro is about to sing. So often the request has seemed to savor of the feeling that we could do this and this alone.
Countee Cullen
I have no will to weep or sing,
No least desire to pray or curse;
The loss of love is a terrible thing;
They lie who say that death is worse.
Countee Cullen
For we must be one thing or the other, an asset or a liability, the sinew in your wing to help you soar, or the chain to bind you to earth.
Countee Cullen
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Edwin Hubbel Chapin
When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.
Daniel Hannan
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Fra Angelico