Quotes from Robert Hayden

World I have loved and loving hated, is it your sickness luxuriating in my body's world?

something they call the american dream sure we still believe in it i guess an earth man in the tavern said irregardless of the some times night mare facts we always try to double talk our way around and its okay the dreams okay and means whats good could be a damn sight better means every body in the good old u s a should have the chance to get ahead or at least should have three squares a day as for myself i do okay

their vaunted liberty no body pushes me around i have heard them say land of the free they sing what do they fear mistrust betray more than the freedom they boast of in their ignorant pride have seen the squalid ghettoes in their violent cities paradox on paradox how have the americans managed to survive

america as much a problem in metaphysics as it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our galaxy an organism that changes even as i examine it fact and fantasy never twice the same so many variables

Ay! you creatures who have walked on seas of money all your foreign lives! Por caridad.

What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.