Gwendolyn Brooks
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Education
Poetry is life distilled.Collection: Poetry
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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.
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
First fight. Then fiddle.
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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've always thought of myself as a reporter.
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.
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.
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.Collection: Leadership
We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Flower
Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Running
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Believe
It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.Collection: Courage
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.Collection: Being Yourself
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.Collection: Particular
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.Collection: Army
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.Collection: Flower
One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.Collection: Cat
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.Collection: Progress
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.Collection: Life
What, what am I to do with all of this life?Collection: This Life
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!Collection: African American
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.Collection: Happiness
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.Collection: Real
Each body has its art.Collection: Art
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.Collection: Art
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.Collection: White
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.Collection: Song
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.Collection: Facts
It is brave to be involvedCollection: Courage
The poetry is myself.Collection: Poetry Is
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.Collection: Color
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?Collection: Writing
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.Collection: Moments
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.Collection: Baby
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.Collection: Lying
My last defense / Is the present tense.Collection: Live In The Moment
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.Collection: People