Quotes from Gwendolyn Brooks

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.

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.

Her creamy child kissed by the black maid! square on the mouth! World yelled, world writhed, world turned to light and rolled Into her kitchen, nearly knocked her down.

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.

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

Poetry comes out of life.

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.

Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.

Writing is a delicious agony.

One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

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

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.

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

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Poetry is life distilled.

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

What, what am I to do with all of this life?

Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.

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

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.