Best 77 quotes of Gwendolyn Brooks on MyQuotes

Gwendolyn Brooks

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    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?

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Each body has its art.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    First fight. Then fiddle.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    It is brave to be involved

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    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?

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Life for my child is simple, and is good.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    My last defense / Is the present tense.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    Poetry is life distilled.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    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.

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    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.

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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    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.

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    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!

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    Gwendolyn Brooks

    The music is in minors.