1.
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
2.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
3.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
4.
Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
Gwendolyn Brooks
5.
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks
6.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
7.
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
Gwendolyn Brooks
8.
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
9.
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
10.
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
11.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
12.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
13.
Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.
Gwendolyn Brooks
14.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
15.
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
Gwendolyn Brooks
16.
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.
Gwendolyn Brooks
17.
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
Gwendolyn Brooks
18.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
19.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
20.
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
Gwendolyn Brooks
21.
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
22.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
23.
It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
Gwendolyn Brooks
24.
Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
25.
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks
26.
One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
Gwendolyn Brooks
27.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
28.
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
29.
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?
Gwendolyn Brooks
30.
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
31.
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
32.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
33.
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
34.
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
Gwendolyn Brooks
35.
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
Gwendolyn Brooks
36.
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
37.
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
38.
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.
Gwendolyn Brooks
39.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
Gwendolyn Brooks
40.
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks
41.
Each body has its art.
Gwendolyn Brooks
42.
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
Gwendolyn Brooks
43.
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
44.
What shall I give my children? who are poor, / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land...
Gwendolyn Brooks
45.
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?
Gwendolyn Brooks
46.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
47.
Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
Gwendolyn Brooks
48.
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
Gwendolyn Brooks
49.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
50.
Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
Gwendolyn Brooks