Top 50 Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Poetry Quotes, Keep Going Quotes

2. “We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

3. “Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

Featured in: Reading Quotes

4. “Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

5. “Poetry is life distilled.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

6. “Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

7. “Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

13. “Writing is a delicious agony.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

14. “The poetry is myself.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

16. “Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

17. “Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

18. “It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud. Nevertheless, live. Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

19. “First fight. Then fiddle.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

20. “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

21. “Life for my child is simple, and is good.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

23. “One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

27. “Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

28. “I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

29. “I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

31. “Each body has its art...”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

32. “She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

34. “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

35. “With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

36. “Be careful what you swallow. Chew!”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

37. “I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

38. “I’ve always thought of myself as a reporter.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

39. “I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

40. “Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

42. “When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

43. “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

44. “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

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

— Gwendolyn Brooks

46. “I’ve always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don’t stop writing, I say, ‘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

47. “Nothing could stop Mississippi.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

48. “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

49. “Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

50. “No man can give me any word but Wait...”

— Gwendolyn Brooks