Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.

What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Book Power

Books feed and cure and
chortle and collide.

In all this willful world
of thud and thump and thunder
man’s relevance to books
continues to declare.

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

To create - a role, a poem, picture, music, a rapture in stone: great. But not for her.
What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other.
She would polish and hone that.

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.

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray.

Tragedy.
She considered that word. On the whole, she felt, life was more comedy than tragedy. Nearly everything that happened had its comic element, not too well buried, either. Sooner or later one could find something to laugh at in almost every situation. That was what, in the last analysis, could keep folks from going mad. The truth was, if you got a good Tragedy out of a lifetime, one good, ripping tragedy, thorough, unridiculous, bottom-scraping, not the issue of human stupidity, you were doing, she thought, very well, you were doing very well.

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

"If
you scream, you're marked "insane."
But silence is a place in which to scream!"

But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive, and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world — or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of — beastly inconvenient — the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere?
And was not this something to be thankful for?
And in the meantime, while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat. They would even get up nonsense, through wars, through divorce, through evictions and jiltings and taxes.
And, in the meantime, she was going to have another baby.
The weather was bidding her bon voyage.

Since a man must bring
To music what his mother spanked him for
When he was two: bits of forgotten hate,
Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts:
The little dream his father humored: the thing
His sister did for money: what he ate
For breakfast — and for dinner twenty years
Ago last autumn: all his skipped desserts.

"A writer needs to read almost more than his eyes can bear, to know what is going, & what has gone on.... And a writer needs general knowledge. And a writer needs to write. And a writer needs to live richly with eyes open, & heart, too." —

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.

Everybody here
is infirm.
Everybody here is infirm.