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Life & Wisdom Quote by Langston Hughes

"I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go"

About this Quote

A line like this lands because it refuses the two easy stories Americans like to tell about ambition: that destiny is either bestowed by luck or blocked by fate. Hughes offers a third option, tougher and more intimate: desire as strategy. The key word is not "anywhere" but "ways" - plural, practical, improvisational. It suggests detours, side doors, and the kind of resourcefulness that doesn’t show up in official narratives of success.

Coming from Langston Hughes, that subtext sharpens. Hughes wrote during a century when Black aspiration was constantly policed by law, violence, and genteel exclusion. So the sentence reads as both encouragement and coded realism. He’s not promising an unlocked door; he’s implying you may have to find a window. "If you really want to go" is less a motivational poster than a test of appetite: how much are you willing to endure, risk, sacrifice, reinvent? The repetition of "go" makes movement itself the point - migration, escape, opportunity, self-making. It echoes the Great Migration’s physical geography and the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural one: getting someplace new often meant leaving something behind.

The intent, then, isn’t naive uplift. It’s a survival-minded ethic aimed at people denied straightforward routes. Hughes frames agency without pretending the world is fair, and that tension is why the line still travels: it honors willpower while quietly admitting the map is rigged.

Quote Details

TopicMotivational
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Hughes, Langston. (2026, January 14). I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-discovered-in-life-that-there-are-ways-of-32423/

Chicago Style
Hughes, Langston. "I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go." FixQuotes. January 14, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-discovered-in-life-that-there-are-ways-of-32423/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go." FixQuotes, 14 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-have-discovered-in-life-that-there-are-ways-of-32423/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 - May 22, 1967) was a Poet from USA.

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