Top 84 Quotes & Sayings by Gwendolyn Brooks
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.
Last updated on December 22, 2024.
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.
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.
I've always thought of myself as a reporter.
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.
First fight. Then fiddle.
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.
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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.
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.
Poetry is life distilled.
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?
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
My last defense / Is the present tense.
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Each body has its art.
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.
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
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.
When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.
The poetry is myself.
One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
It is brave to be involved
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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.
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.
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?
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
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.
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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?
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
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.
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.
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
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.
Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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 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.
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
What shall I give my children? who are poor, / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land...
Writing is a delicious agony.
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
Related Authors
Alexander Pope Quotes
English
Poet
Emily Dickinson Quotes
American
Poet
George Herbert Quotes
British
Poet
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Quotes
American
Poet
Homer Quotes
Greek
Poet
Horace Quotes
Roman
Poet
John Milton Quotes
English
Poet
Khalil Gibran Quotes
Lebanese
Poet
Lord Byron Quotes
British
Poet
Maya Angelou Quotes
American
Poet
Oscar Wilde Quotes
Irish
Poet
Ovid Quotes
Roman
Poet
T. S. Eliot Quotes
American
Poet
Walt Whitman Quotes
American
Poet
William Butler Yeats Quotes
Irish
Poet