Gwendolyn Brooks > Quotes

“my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

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.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems

“My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Conversations With Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

“We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

“If
you scream, you're marked "insane."
But silence is a place in which to scream!”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca

“Hateful things sometimes befall the hateful
but the hateful are not rendered lovable thereby.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca

“This is the urgency: Live!
And have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, The World of Gwendolyn Brooks

“Everybody here
is infirm.
Everybody here is infirm.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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."

—”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha

“Poetry is life distilled. –”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“To say yes is to die
A lot or a little.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems

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

“Poetry comes out of life.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“He who was Goodness, Gentleness,
And Dignity is free,
Translates to public Love
Old private charity.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“Not that anybody is saying that these people have no trouble.
Merely that it is trouble with a gold-flecked beautiful banner.

Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And
Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours.
It is just that so often they live till their hair is white.
They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers. . . .”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen

“If thou be more than hate or atmosphere
Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.
Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

“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.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca