Quotes from Gwendolyn Brooks

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Everybody here is infirm. Everybody here is infirm.

The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.

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." —

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

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

Live and go out. Define and medicate the whirlwind.

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.

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

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. . . .

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.

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

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

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.

It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates. And Mabbie was all of seven. And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar. And Mabbie thought life was heaven.