Quotes from Gwendolyn Brooks

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

Each body has its art...

Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud. Nevertheless, live. Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.

Surely--But I am very off from that. From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrow that was my clean naivete and my faith. This morning, men deliver wounds and death. They will deliver death and wounds tomorrow. And I doubt all. You. Or a violet.

You are the beautiful half of a golden hurt.

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 find that what was common could also be a flower.

What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.

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

Each body has its art.

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

It is brave to be involved

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.