Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

Recipient and benefactor.
It's so good of you.
You're being so good.

Gwendolyn Brooks
People are so in need, in need of help.
People want so much that they do not know.

Gwendolyn Brooks
I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.

Gwendolyn Brooks
He ran like a mad thing into the night
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.
By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
"Nigger—" his neighbors said.

Gwendolyn Brooks
I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Is earnest enough, may earnest attract or lead to light;
Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsically, enlist;
Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?
Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.

Gwendolyn Brooks
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

Gwendolyn Brooks
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

Gwendolyn Brooks
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is
overmuch.
Too much too bear.

Gwendolyn Brooks
He opened us — who was a key, who was a man.

Gwendolyn Brooks
What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Beware the easy griefs that fool and fuel nothing.

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 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
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

Gwendolyn Brooks
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind,
Disdain for all time to be overglad.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Big Bessie's feet hurt like nobody's business, but she stands — bigly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands in the wild weed. In the wild weed she is a citizen.

Gwendolyn Brooks
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.

Gwendolyn Brooks
We do not want them to have less.
But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough.
We drive on, we drive on.

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
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

Gwendolyn Brooks
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
What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land.

Gwendolyn Brooks
I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

Gwendolyn Brooks
The good man.
He is still enhancer, renouncer.
In the time of detachment,
in the time of the vivid heather and affectionate evil,
in the time of oral
grave grave legalities of hate - all real
walks our prime registered reproach and seal.
Our successful moral.
The good man.

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
What shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Gimme an upsweep, Minnie,
With humpteen baby curls,
'Bout time I got some glamour,
I'll show them girls.

Gwendolyn Brooks