Countee Cullen Quotes

I cut my teeth as the black raccoon
For implements of battle.

Whatever lives is granted breath But by the grace and sufferance of Death.

Lord, I fashion dark gods, too,
Daring even to give You
Dark despairing features

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.

All day long and all night through, One thing only must I do: Quench my pride and cool my blood, Lest I perish in the flood.

The key to all strange things is in thy heart ... / My spirit has come home, that sailed the doubtful seas.

Man dreams that he is more than a leaf on a tree.'
-Leaves by Countee Cullen

I have a rendezvous with life.

And if I please you so, my lover,
Remember praise is comely.

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds, And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

I was reared in the conservative atmosphere of a Methodist parsonage.

Dame Poverty gave me my name,
And Pain godfathered me.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars, is no less lovely being dark

In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.

We shall not always plant while others reap

We were not made to eternally weep.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

Never love with all your heart, It only ends in aching.

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind

My poetry, I think, has become the way of my giving out what music is within me

There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.

Give but a grain of the heart's rich seed, Confine some under cover, And when love goes, bid him God-speed. And find another lover.

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

What is last year's snow to me,
Last year's anything? The tree
Budding yearly must forget
How its past arose or set

Death cut the strings that gave me life,
And handed me to Sorrow,
The only kind of middle wife
My folks could beg or borrow.

Your love to me was like an unread book.

The loss of love is a terrible thing; They lie who say that death is worse.

Not for myself I make this prayer, But for this race of mine That stretches forth from shadowed places Dark hands for bread and wine.

Ever at Thy glowing altar Must my heart grow sick and falter, Wishing He I served were black.