Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes & Sayings

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

My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

My last defense / Is the present tense. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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

What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that. — Gwendolyn Brooks

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

Writing is a delicious agony. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

The poetry is myself. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each body has its art... — Gwendolyn Brooks

Life for my child is simple, and is good. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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

At a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves. — Gwendolyn Brooks

Nothing could stop Mississippi. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

I've always thought of myself as a reporter. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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! — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

Truth

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?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years -
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder? -
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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

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

It is brave to be involved — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

Poetry is life distilled. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

Be careful what you swallow. Chew! — Gwendolyn Brooks

Life must be aromatic.
There must be scent, somehow there must be some. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

No man can give me any word but Wait ... — Gwendolyn Brooks

Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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. — Gwendolyn Brooks

The music is in minors. — Gwendolyn Brooks

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