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 BROOKSBe yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
-
-
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?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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 -
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
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 -
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 -
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Writing is a delicious agony.
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 -
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Exhaust the little moment soon it dies.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
The poetry is myself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.
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 -
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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 -
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS