Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
—Joseph Brodsky (b. 1940)
One hand cannot cover up the sun.
—Chinese proverb.
I maintain that I have been a Negro three times—a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)