Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

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.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.

Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.

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

Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.

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.

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

Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.

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

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.

Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.

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

A poem doesn't do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person's poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you.

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

What, what am I to do with all of this life?

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.

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

Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.