Quote

Poetry is life distilled.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Distilled
Poetry
Life

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

Image
My last defense / Is the present tense.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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
Image
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
The poetry is myself.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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
Image
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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
Image
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks