Quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.
First fight. Then fiddle.
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.
Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
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.
I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
It helped me to have somebody tell me what he thought was wrong with my work, and then bounce the analysis back and forth.
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
I've always thought of myself as a reporter.
Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
The '40s and '50s were years of high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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 to say that these poems have to be simple, but I want to clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picturemaking I've always been interested in.
Remedial fears. Muscular tears.
Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours....
"Men there were and men there be But never men so many Chief enough to marry me," Thought the proud late Annie.
"Remember When cruelty, metal, public, uncomplex,...
Now who could take you off to tiny life In one room or in two rooms or in three...
