Top 15 Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

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

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

Writing is a delicious agony.

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

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

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

When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story — And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday,
And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday — When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed,
Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon
Looking off down the long street
To nowhere,
Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation
And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why?
And if-Monday-never-had-to-come — When you have forgotten that, I say,
And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell,
And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang;
And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner,
That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner
To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles
Or chicken and rice
And salad and rye bread and tea
And chocolate chip cookies — I say, when you have forgotten that,
When you have forgotten my little presentiment
That the war would be over before they got to you;
And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed,
And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end
Bright bedclothes,
Then gently folded into each other — When you have, I say, forgotten all that,
Then you may tell,
Then I may believe
You have forgotten me well.

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

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

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

Poetry is life distilled.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water

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

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

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