Gwendolyn Brooks

Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Each body has its art. Each body has its pose.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words
Gwendolyn Brooks

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.
Gwendolyn Brooks

I've always thought of myself as a reporter.
Gwendolyn Brooks

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?
Gwendolyn Brooks

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.
Gwendolyn Brooks

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 picture-making I've always been interested in.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks

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 picture-making I've always been interested in.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks

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

The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; 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!
Gwendolyn Brooks

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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

Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come Again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks

It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
Gwendolyn Brooks

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
Gwendolyn Brooks