Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

He is not there but You know you are tasting together The winter, or a light spring weather. His hand to take your hand is overmuch. Too much too bear.

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

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

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

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

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

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

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

People who have no children can be hard:
Attain a mail of ice and insolence:

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.

Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish. Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,
Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an icebox pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.
No. There is more to it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash
And the blocks fall, down on the people's heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloopily out across the floor.
And so forth.
Not that success, for him, is sure, infallible.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.

"Well, life has been a baffled vehicle
And baffling. But she fights, and
Has fought, according to her lights and
The lenience of her whirling-place.

She fights with semi-folded arms,
Her strong bag, and the stiff
Frost of her face (that challenges "When" and "If.")
And altogether she does Rather Well."