“Something about my grandmother’s stories (without her ever having said so) taught me the uselessness of crying about anything.”

Describing an early lesson in resilience absorbed indirectly through storytelling · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Hope
• Memory

“Nobody ever cried in my grandmother’s stories. They worked, or schemed, or fought. But no crying.”

Remembering family stories that presented hardship through endurance and action · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Memory

“Hundreds of colored people. I wanted to shake hands with them, speak to them. I hadn’t seen any colored people for so long.”

Remembering the powerful sense of recognition and community he felt on reaching Harlem · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Joy
• Memory

“I can never put on paper the thrill of that underground ride to Harlem.”

Recalling an excitement so strong that even a writer found it difficult to capture · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Joy
• Memory

“Harlem was like a great magnet for the Negro intellectual, pulling him from everywhere. Or perhaps the magnet was New York, but once in New York, he had to live in Harlem.”

Remembering Harlem's extraordinary attraction for Black writers and artists · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Art
• Memory

“Hardly had I climbed into a rickshaw than I saw riding in another along the Bund a Negro who looked exactly like a Harlemite.”

Capturing the unexpected recognitions that accompanied Hughes's travels · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Memory

“Moscow dental customs, the unveiling of the harem women in Turkestan, and the disappearance of the color line throughout Soviet Asia, are the three achievements I remember best of the whole USSR.”

Recalling the aspects of Soviet life that most strongly remained in his memory · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Memory

“When I was twenty-seven, the stock-market crash came. When I was twenty-eight my personal crash came. Then I guess I woke up. So, when I was almost thirty, I began to make my living from writing.”

Remembering personal and economic crisis as a turning point towards a life of writing · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Art
• Memory
• Time

“Most of my life from childhood on has been spent moving, traveling, changing places, knowing people in one school, in one town or in one group, or on one ship a little while, but soon never seeing most of them again.”

Describing a life characterised by movement, brief encounters and repeated departures · Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

• Memory
• Solitude
• Time

“One can not go back and change anything one has done in the past.”

A sober acknowledgement of the permanence of past actions · Senate testimony, 1953

• Memory
• Time

“A critical work goes out of a very deep background, it does not come in a moment.”

Emphasising the accumulated experience behind serious artistic or critical expression · Senate testimony, 1953

• Art
• Memory

“Those things affected my childhood very much and very deeply.”

Acknowledging how early experiences continued to shape his outlook · Senate testimony, 1953

• Childhood
• Memory

“It was my first revelation of the division between the American citizens.”

Recalling an early awareness of racial division in American life · Senate testimony, 1953

• Childhood
• Memory
• Truth

“I, sir, was born in Joplin, Missouri. I was born a Negro.”

Stating plainly the identity and circumstances from which much of his experience arose · Senate testimony, 1953

• Memory
• Truth

“Both of them were very good and kind—the one who went to church and the one who didn't.”

Remembering goodness as something not confined to religious observance · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Faith
• Memory

“Through my grandmother's stories always life moved, moved heroically toward an end.”

Remembering how family storytelling shaped his earliest understanding of courage · Autobiography, The Big Sea

• Childhood
• Memory