Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

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

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

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.

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.

When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story


-- And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday --
When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I'm-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come -
When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies --
I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other -
When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud. Nevertheless, live. Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.

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

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

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

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.

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

Book Power

Books feed and cure and
chortle and collide.

In all this willful world
of thud and thump and thunder
man's relevance to books
continues to declare.

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

The poetry is myself.

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 disguise.

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

You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.
Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

Everybody here
is infirm.
Everybody here is infirm.

If
you scream, you're marked "insane."
But silence is a place in which to scream!

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

Nothing could stop Mississippi.

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray.

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

Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don't get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don't know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.

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.

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

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

Each body has its art...

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

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

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

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

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.

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?

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

Writing is a delicious agony.

You are the beautiful half
of a golden hurt.

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 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.

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

Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble.
Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner.

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers. . . .

Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

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

The music is in minors.

But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to find that what was common could also be a flower.

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

Surely
But I am very off from that.
From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrow
that was my clean naivete and my faith.
This morning, men deliver wounds and death.
They will deliver death and wounds tomorrow.
And I doubt all. You. Or a violet.

But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world - or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of - beastly inconvenient - the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere?
And was not this something to be thankful for?
And in the meantime, while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat. They would even get up nonsense, through wars, through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and taxes.
And, in the meantime, she was going to have another baby.
The weather was bidding her bon voyage.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

If thou be more than hate or atmosphere
Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.
Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

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

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