Top 100 Gwendolyn Quotes
#2. They were old, their covers cracked and their bindings frayed, but as far as Gwendolyn was concerned that only made the words cocooned between their musty pages more precious.
Teresa Medeiros
#3. Sincerity like this staggers me; I've seen too little and too much of it one way and another; I've valued it so highly that when someone hands it to me as directly as you have, I'm not sure whether I should jump for joy or burst into tears. - Gwendolyn MacEwen to Milton Acorn, 1960 (age 19)
David Eso
#4. Surprisingly, Gwendolyn, I have more important things to do with my time, like put bamboo shoots under my nails or drill holes in all my teeth.
Shelly Laurenston
#5. Each poet probably has his or her own cupboard of magnets. For some, it is cars; for others, works of art, or certain patterns of form or sound; for others, certain stories or places, Philip Levine's Detroit, Gwendolyn Brooks's Chicago, Seamus Heaney's time-tunneled, familied Ireland.
Jane Hirshfield
#6. Do you think that Gwendolyn Brooks would give an award to someone who hated Black women, the lie that was circulated throughout New York and reached all the way down to Martinique where I was a guest Professor? The lie was circulated by people who don't read my books.
Ishmael Reed
#7. But when he saw Gwendolyn's father, he immediately knew that he was Jewish, in the way that Jews recognize each other, as if with a sixth sense.
Sharon Pomerantz
#8. Just her and the great outdoors. Gwendolyn Margaret Passmore and a million blades of grass.
Julia Quinn
#10. I was reading Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks, and I'm still very, very deeply moved by Gwendolyn Brooks's life and her work.
Sandra Cisneros
#11. I cannot live without you, Gwendolyn, nor can I believe the gods have brought us through so much only to tear us apart again. If I must face the possibility of death, then so be it.
Miriam Minger
#12. The thing no one understood about Gwendolyn Reese was that she was three ages at once: thirty chronologically, forty-five intellectually and fifteen experientially.
Marilyn Brant
#13. We can't ignore right-wing demagogues who insist that the word of the doctor who proclaims a child's sex at birth somehow holds more sway over the reality of the body than the word of the person who inhabits it. - Gwendolyn Ann Smith
Kate Bornstein
#14. 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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#15. She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#16. We don't ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#17. Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#18. Books are meat and medicine
and flame and flight and flower
steel, stitch, cloud and clout,
and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#19. Just because you're from a small town doesn't mean that you're small. Don't ever think anyone's more important than you are or has more valid experiences.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#20. A remarkable fact of nature is that problems almost always get solved just when they are meant to. And those who can help solve the problems almost always show up at the right time.
Cynthia Rylant
#21. I thought it was who I was with or where I was that defined me in some way. I realize now that I decide who I am, no matter the company I keep or the place I am.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#23. Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#25. I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#26. Just so you know," Bubby says before returning to his seat, "if I had been there, I would have carried you to the hospital on my back.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#28. But it is never over;
nothing ends until we want it to.
Look, in shattered midnights,
On black ice under silver trees,
We are still dancing, dancing.
Gwendolyn MacEwen
#29. I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#30. He painted until the hours towered above him, pressing down upon his body and begging him to stop.
Gwendolyn Womack
#31. The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#32. Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#33. I want to feel the surging
Of my sad people's soul
Hidden by a minstrel-smile.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett
#34. Even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#35. I guess you understand what I mean, Kitsy.
It's okay to just be your best self though. Change doesn't always mean growth.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#36. Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#37. Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical disguise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#41. Always be willing to love again. Loving once is easy. Loving twice is harder, but love anytime is always worth it.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#42. I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#43. To be in love
Is to touch things with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#44. People aren't pianos. You don't hit a certain note and know what you're going to get.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#47. 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
#49. When in the throes of our desolation, it is difficult to hope. But when it is time, we walk the corridors of our heart, retrieving the shattered threads of once-believed dreams.
Gwendolyn M. Plano
#50. My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#51. This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#52. All things are plotting to make us whole / All things conspire to make us one.
Gwendolyn MacEwen
#53. And if sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?
Gwendolyn Brooks
#54. The best dreams are the ones we have as children because they're most pure.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#55. existence like every middle-school student who'd ever been forced to come out of their bedroom.
Gwendolyn Knapp
#56. It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#58. Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#59. Maybe not all goodbyes are the end - and that's what makes them good.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#60. 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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#61. Once inside I stripped off my clothes and showered. Refreshed, I pick up my phone and type.
ME: I want you. Come over now if you feel the same way.
I held my breath as a I waited for a response but after several minutes none came. Maybe he wasn't going to come.
Gwendolyn Grace
#62. When you use the term minority or minorities
in reference to people, you're telling them that
they're less than somebody else.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#63. I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#66. I think it's practical to follow your dreams since that's what will make you happy. Isn't it actually impractical to do something we don't like? That'd be setting ourselves up for failure.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#67. At a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#68. I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#69. It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction ...
Gwendolyn Brooks
#70. 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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#72. Now you comprehend your first and final lover / in the dark receding planets of his eyes, / and this is the hour when you know moreover / that the god you have loved always / will descend and lie with you in paradise.
Gwendolyn MacEwen
#73. 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
Gwendolyn Brooks
#74. Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#77. Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#78. I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#80. I wonder whoever put the word good with bye. It's stupid. There's nothing good about them.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#81. Sixth-grade sweethearts. Wow. New Yorkers only commit to that type of monogamy with the Yankees or Giants
Gwendolyn Heasley
#84. There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#85. I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#86. When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#88. And speaking of hotties, I have to go," I finish and turn to finish my walk toward Bubby.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#89. When it came time to build a tabernacle, the Israelite women brought all their mirrors to Moses so he could use them to make God's building more beautiful. (Exodus 38:8.) They were far more interested in enjoying God's glory than reflecting on their own images.
Gwendolyn Diaz
#90. Happily ever after is not a place: It's a state of being, and you have to work at it every day.
Gwendolyn Heasley
#91. When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#92. According to Plato, Socrates believed all knowledge came from a divine state, but humans had forgotten it. Most lived in a cave of ignorance, but one could become enlightened by climbing out of the darkness and understanding the divide between the spiritual and material planes.
Gwendolyn Womack
#93. People are so in need, in need of help.
People want so much that they do not know.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#94. 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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#96. 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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#97. We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#98. I realize now that tragedy spares no one; it just courts each of us differently.
Gwendolyn M. Plano
#99. Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
