Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

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

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

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

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

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.

Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul - the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.

Hold fast to dreams For when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.

To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'

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