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

I tasted the bread and wine of equality..

If I had never met him I would have dreamed him into being..

The world is a wheel always turning..

The power that makes grass grow, fruit ripen, and guides the bird in flight is in us all..

As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of underst….

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

I'm one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in..

Poor people who had escaped from poverty as I had, feared it, hated it and fled from it all their lives. Those born rich could afford to be touched b….

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 h….

Science has salvaged scrap metal and even found vitamins and valuable oils in refuse, but old people are extravagantly wasted..

At last I came to college. I rushed for it with the outstretched arms of youth's aching hunger to give and take of life's deepest, and highest, and I….

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 hol….

The real thing creates its own poetry..

Poverty was an ornament on a learned man like a red ribbon on a white horse..

I too was frightened the first time I felt I hated my father. I felt like a criminal. But could I help it what was inside of me? I had to feel what I….

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 ….

I've borne the shame of mother while you bought her off with a present and a treat here and there. God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as n….

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 ….

The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts..

Though my father was poor and had nothing, the Torah, the poetry of prophets, was his daily bread..