Robert Hayden famous quotes

04-17-2025

As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle as a mouth, as well have a hollow as a heart.
-- Robert Hayden

#Heart #Mouths #Muzzle
Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering, first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah.
-- Robert Hayden

#Track #Special #Slavery
Harriet Tubman, woman of earth, whipscarred, a summoning, a shinning
-- Robert Hayden

#Earth #Slavery #Summoning
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness into darkness and the darkness thicketed with shapes of terror and the hunters pursuing and the hounds pursuing and the night cold and the night long and the river to cross and the jack-muh-lanterns beckoning beckoning and blackness ahead
-- Robert Hayden

#Running #Fall #Night
Standing to America, bringing home black gold, black ivory, black seed.
-- Robert Hayden

#Home #Ivory #America
Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, the dark ships move, the dark ships move, their bright ironical names like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth
-- Robert Hayden

#Kindness #Moving #Dark
[My poetry is] a way of coming to grips with reality . . . a way of discovery and definition. It is a way of solving for the unknowns.
-- Robert Hayden

#Reality #Discovery #Definitions
Your presence was shore where I rested/ released from the hoodoo of that dance, where I spoke/ with my true voice again.
-- Robert Hayden

#Dance #Voice #Spokes
It seemed to me as we were talking about Christ rising from the dead, the sun popped over the mountain. That was indicative of Christ rising - a new day. It just makes sense.
-- Robert Hayden

#Talking #New Day #Mountain
We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
-- Robert Hayden

#Struggle #Evil #Political
I believe it's true that one person can make a difference. But how much more difference 100 people make, or rather 99.
-- Robert Hayden

#Believe #Differences #People
What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?
-- Robert Hayden

#Lonely #Office
Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.
-- Robert Hayden

#Art #Order #Way
Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fire blazes. No one ever thanked him.
-- Robert Hayden

#Father #Sunday #Hands
This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.
-- Robert Hayden

#Beautiful #Men #Air

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