Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Writing is a delicious agony.

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

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

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.

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

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?

Poetry is life distilled.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

Each body has its art.

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.