Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

Enjoy the top 79 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by 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 —

“Writing is a delicious agony.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— 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

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

“Each body has its art ...”

— 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

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.

— 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

“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

“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

“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

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— 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

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— 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

“Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

“Be careful what you swallow. Chew!”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

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