“We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.”
"We ReaI CooI" , The Bean Eaters (1960)
The "We"—you're supposed to stop after the "We" and think about their validity, and of course there's no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don't bother to question every day, of course.
"An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks", Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970)
The WEs in "We Real Cool" are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative "Kilroy-is-here" announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the "We" softly.
Report from Part One (1972)
Source: Selected Poems
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Gwendolyn Brooks 53
American writer 1917–2000Related quotes
Source: The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008), p. 192.
Context: I built not by parental edict, not under threat, but because of my own native yearning. This was a giant step toward seeing more. Across the country our elders were battling the shades that shrank our minds and abbreviated our world. We thought the corner was cool, but more than that we deeply believed that we could do no better, that this tiny parcel was all we deserved in this world of sin.
“How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die? (88)”
Source: A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last
“When we sin, we think we are geniuses; when we confess, we know we are idiots.”
Source: Lumina and New Lumina (1969), p. 42
“We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.”
Source: Nothing to Be Frightened Of
“Redeemers always reach the world too late.
God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.”
"A Tale of Two Pieties", in The Chair of Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 51.
