“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.”
A Sunset of the City
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Gwendolyn Brooks 53
American writer 1917–2000Related quotes

Letter to Thomas Carlyle, April 1, 1842; cited from Andrew Lang The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart (London: John C. Nimmo, 1897) vol. 2, p. 235.

Letter to George Washington (26 April 1779)

Look, Stranger, on This Island Now (1936), first published in book form in Look, Stranger! (1936; US title On this Island)

“I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top.”
Predicting that he would go senile, as quoted in The Highway of Letters and its Echos of Famous Footsteps (1893) by Thomas Archer, p. 380

Conversation in Moscow, Freedom
Context: Leaps of nerve, heart —
cries of communion: if there is bliss,
it has
been already
and will be; out-
reaching, utterly.
Blind
to itself, flooded
with otherness.

“When I hear Kannada, my heart leaps up and I am all ears.”
Quoted in A Few inches of Ivory, 24 November 2013, Jstor Organization http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23001425?uid=3738256&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21102981873241,