Gwendolyn brooks quotes

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

What shall I give my children? who are poor, / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land...

No man can give me any word but Wait.

Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, `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?

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

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

What, what am I to do with all of this life?

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

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

I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry. ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.

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

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

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

We are each other's magnitude and bond.

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.

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

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.

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

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

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

I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

My last defense / Is the present tense.

It is brave to be involved

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.

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

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

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

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.

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

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.

Nothing could stop Mississippi.

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.

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

Each body has its art.

The music is in minors.

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?

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.

at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.

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

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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.

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.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.

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

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.

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

First fight. Then fiddle.

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

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

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

We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

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

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.

I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.

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!

Poetry is life distilled.

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.

People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

Writing is a delicious agony.

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

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

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

Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

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

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

The poetry is myself.

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