Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

Gwendolyn Brooks shares an earnest, raw glimpse into truth, family and the everyday struggles of life.

63 quotes

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

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

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

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

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

6. 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.

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

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

9. Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

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

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

12. He is not there but You know you are tasting together The winter, or a light spring weather. His hand to take your hand is overmuch. Too much too bear.

13. I shall not sing a May song. A May song should be gay. I'll wait until November And sing a song of gray.

14. And all the little people Will stare at me and say, 'That is the Crazy Woman Who would not sing in May.'

15. 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.

16. Already you're on Page 8.

17. consider the big fists breaking your little bones, or consider the vague bureaucrats stumbling, fumbling through Paper.

18. Is earnest enough, may earnest attract or lead to light; Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsically, enlist; Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades? Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.

19. 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.

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

21. Rudolph Reed was oaken. His wife was oaken too. And his two good girls and his good little man Oakened as they grew.

22. Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed, Nary a curse cursed he, But moved in his House. With his dark little wife, And his dark little children three.

23. The first night, a rock, big as two fists. The second, a rock big as three. But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed. (Though oaken as man could be.) The third night, a silvery ring of glass. Patience arched to endure, But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood Was staining her gaze so pure.

24. He ran like a mad thing into the night And the words in his mouth were stinking. By the time he had hurt his first white man He was no longer thinking. By the time he had hurt his fourth white man Rudolph Reed was dead. His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse. 'Nigger-' his neighbors said.

25. Small Mabel whimpered all night long, For calling herself the cause. Her oak-eyed mother did no thing But change the bloody gauze.

26. The good man. He is still enhancer, renouncer. In the time of detachment, in the time of the vivid heather and affectionate evil, in the time of oral grave grave legalities of hate - all real walks our prime registered reproach and seal. Our successful moral. The good man.

27. Coherent Counsel! Good man. Require of us our terribly excluded blue. Constrain, repair a ripped, revolted land. Put hand in hand land over. Reprove the abler droughts and manias of the day and a felicity entreat. Love. Complete your pledges, reinforce your aides, renew stance, testament.

28. Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love...(sex).

29. It is a real chill out,

30. It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes I am aware there is winter to heed. There is no warm house That is fitted with my need.

31. Come: there shall be such islanding from grief, And small communion with the master shore. Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin, Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry In humming pallor or to leap and die.

32. Somebody muffed it?? Somebody wanted to joke.

33. Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

34. I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

35. What shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

36. Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.

37. That time we all heard it, cool and clear, cutting across the hot grit of the day. The major Voice. The adult Voice forgoing Rolling River, forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge and other symptoms of an old despond. Warning, in music-words devout and large, that we are each other's harvest: we are each other's business: we are each other's magnitude and bond.

38. Our earth is round, and, among other things That means that you and I can hold completely different Points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show Stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, While mine, at the same moment, Spreads beautiful to darkness.

39. Once chosen, our cornering will determine The message of any star and darkness we encounter.

40. Each body has its art...

41. Poetry is life distilled.

42. Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

43. 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.

44. My last defense / Is the present tense.

45. Nothing could stop Mississippi.

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

47. 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?

48. 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.

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

50. 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!

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

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

53. 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.

54. 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?

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

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

57. 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.

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

59. Then to know The hunched hells across the sea.

60. 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?

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

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

63. We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.