Gwendolyn Brooks Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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've always thought of myself as a reporter.

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.

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 am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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.

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.

No man can give me any word but Wait ...

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 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.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

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

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.

My last defense / Is the present tense.

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.

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.

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

Nothing could stop Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The poetry is myself.

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

Life for my child is simple, and is good.

The music is in minors.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We are each other's magnitude and bond.

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

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

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

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.

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?

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.

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

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?

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

Each body has its art...

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Writing is a delicious agony.

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

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

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.

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