I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSI think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSNo man can give me any word but Wait.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSExhaust the little moment soon it dies.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSThe poetry is myself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSThis is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSI am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSThe music is in minors.
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSLife for my child is simple, and is good.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSThere can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSWhen I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSThe 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 BROOKSDo not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSI 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 BROOKSAs you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSReading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS