Langston Hughes Quotes

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun? Or does it explode?

I think you always have regrets.

It's no accident that I'm not married and don't have kids yet. Because, despite what I've achieved in my career, I'm always wondering when somebody's gonna tap me on the shoulder and say, 'OK, the gig is up.'

My character, Rick Spleen, is a what-if version of me, really, where nothing did quite turn out right and everything else is still around the corner.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotencies.

Things don't always work out as you want them to.

It's always bitterly disappointing to people to see how normally one can live.

At 30 I thought my life was over. I thought I'd have made something of myself by then, that life would somehow have made the necessary arrangements - but actually I had nothing.

If you're alive for more than five minutes, you're going to be disappointed.

It has been my observation that parents kill more dreams than anybody.

Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.

I haven't shaken my fists at the moon.

Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.

I am not unaware of the saying that more tears have been shed over wishes granted than wishes denied.

I don't think any of us grew up into the world we were hoping for or expecting.

I'm actually not a particularly negative person, but I feel like most things are better when they're not actualized. The motivation that comes from wanting something is so much more driving of people than actually getting it.

Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.

Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves.

Only way you can you get upset is when you expecting something.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'.

Maybe it would have been better if neither of us had been born.