Gwendolyn Brooks: Trending quotes

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Gwendolyn Brooks: 106 quotes1 like

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

Gwendolyn Brooks book Maud Martha

Source: Maud Martha

“Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

"The Chicago Picasso" (1968)

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

Gwendolyn Brooks

"To Be In Love"
Variant: To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
Source: Selected Poems

“The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)
The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience arched to endure,
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

“I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Mother (1945)

“Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Mother (1945)

“consider the big fists breaking your little bones,
or consider the vague bureaucrats
stumbling, fumbling through Paper.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

"Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg"

“I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Quoted in her obituary in The Guardian (7 December 2000)

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

Gwendolyn Brooks

"do not be afraid of no" from Annie Allen (1949)

“It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

A Sunset of the City

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

Gwendolyn Brooks

Black Poetry Writing (1975)

“Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

“As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Report From Part One (1972)

“Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

“Be careful what you swallow. Chew!”

Gwendolyn Brooks

Advice to graduates, Buena Vista University Graduation (1995)

“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.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

"my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell"

“Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

A Sunset of the City

“What shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.”

Gwendolyn Brooks

The Mother (1945)

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

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988)