Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSWhat 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.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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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.
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People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.
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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.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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Poetry is life distilled.
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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
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Life for my child is simple, and is good.
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There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
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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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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.
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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The music is in minors.
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No man can give me any word but Wait.
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I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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The poetry is myself.
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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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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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What, what am I to do with all of this life?
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
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Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.
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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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS