Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

My last defense / Is the present tense.

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

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.

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

No man can give me any word but Wait.

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

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

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

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.

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.

Each body has its art.

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.

It is brave to be involved

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

First fight. Then fiddle.

The poetry is myself.

Writing is a delicious agony.

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.

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

We are each other's magnitude and bond.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

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

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

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