Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes - Page 3

I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.

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?

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

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.

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

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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.

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

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

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.

Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.

beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.

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

With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.

There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.

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

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

I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

The music is in minors.

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.

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!