Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

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

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

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

Poetry comes out of life.

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

To say yes is to die
A lot or a little.

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.

Poetry is life distilled. –

She would have liked a lotus, or China asters or the Japanese Iris, or meadow lilies — yes, she would have liked meadow lilies, because the very word meadow made her breathe more deeply, and either fling her arms or want to fling her arms, depending on who was by, rapturously up to whatever was watching in the sky. But dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard. She liked their demure prettiness second to their everydayness; for in that latter quality she thought she saw a picture of herself, and it was comforting to know that was was common could also be a flower.

...
Before your horror can be sweet.
Or proper.
Before your grief is other than discreet.
The intellectual damn
Will nurse your half-hurt. Quickly you are well.
But weary. How you yawn, have yet to see
Why nothing exhausts you like this sympathy

To say yes is to die
A lot or a little. The dead wear capably their wry

Enameled emblems. They smell.
But that and that they do not altogether yell is all that we know well.

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

Her new wish was to smile
When answers took no airships, walked a while.

Think of sweet and chocolate,
Left to folly or to fate,
Whom the higher gods forgot,
Whom the lower gods berate;
Physical and underfed
Fancying on the featherbed
What was never and is not.

In Little Rock the people sing
Sunday hymns like anything,
through Sunday pomp and polishing.

And after testament and tunes,
Some soften Sunday afternoons
With lemon tea and Lorna Doones.

I forecast
And I believe

Live and go out.
Define and
medicate the whirlwind.

It is not necessary, says Yvonne,
to have every day with him whom
to the end thereof you will love.
Because it is tasty to remember
he is alive, and laughs
in somebody else’s room.
or is slicing a cucumber,
or is buttoning his cuffs,
or is signing with his pen
and will plan
to touch you again.