I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSI 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.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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Poetry is life distilled.
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!
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 -
When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
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 -
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
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 -
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
The poetry is myself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
No man can give me any word but Wait.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS