Gwendolyn Brooks Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
He's the comfort
and wine and piccalilli for my soul.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Time upholds or overturns
The many, tight, and small concerns.

Gwendolyn Brooks
It is brave to be involved
To be not fearful to be unresolved.

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home.

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

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Life must be aromatic.
There must be scent, somehow there must be some.

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

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

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
Reading is very important—read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

Gwendolyn Brooks
This is the urgency: Live!
and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
At a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Sometimes you have to deal
Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

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

Gwendolyn Brooks
Maud went to college,
Sadie stayed at home.
Sadie scraped life
With a fine-tooth comb.

Gwendolyn Brooks
To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.

Gwendolyn Brooks
The time
cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

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

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

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