Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

If you ask a question, you
can't stop there.
You must keep going.
You can't stop there: World will
wave; will be
facetious, angry. You can't stop there.
You have to keep on going.

What mannerisms I present, employ,
Are camouflage, and what my mouths remark
To word-wall off that broadness of the dark
Is pitiful,
I am not brave at all.

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

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.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Everybody here
is infirm.
Everybody here is infirm.

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.
The gun will wait. The lake will wait.
The tall gall in the small seductive vial
will wait will wait:
will wait a week: will wait through April.
You do not have to die this certain day.
Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.
I assure you death will wait. Death has
a lot of time. Death can
attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is
just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;
can meet you any moment.
You need not die today.
Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.
Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use.
Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

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.

I pass you my Poem. 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.

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

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

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

When you use the term minority or minorities
in reference to people, you're telling them that
they're less than somebody else.

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

Hateful things sometimes befall the hateful
but the hateful are not rendered lovable thereby.