The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me.

Hell, is trying to do what you can’t do, trying to be what you’re not.

I was so obsessed and consumed with my grievances that I could not get away from myself and think things out in the light. I was in the grip of that blinding, destructive, terrible thing – righteous indignation.

I want knowledge. How, like a starved thing in the dark, I’m driven to reach for it.

Those who were high go down low, and those who’ve been low go up higher.

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can’t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

Woe is me! Bitter is me! For what is my life? Why didn’t the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?

This fire in me, it’s not just the hunger of a woman for a man – it’s the hunger of all my people back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!

When I only begin to read, I forget I’m on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts.

Give a beggar a dime and he’ll bless you. Give him a dollar and he’ll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.