Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

What I'm fighting for now in my work.

.. for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body.

His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.

Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy.

It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.

Poetry is life distilled.

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.

People like definite decisions, / Tidy answers, all the little ravelings / Snipped off, the lint removed, they / Hop happily among their roughs / Calling what they can't clutch insanity / Or saintliness.

As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

Each body has its art.

We are each other's magnitude and bond.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

And if sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

It is brave to be involved

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!

I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.

I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.

First fight. Then fiddle.

Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.

I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

My last defense / Is the present tense.

Nothing could stop Mississippi.

There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.

Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.

A poem doesn't do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person's poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you.

Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.

To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.