Gwendolyn Brooks

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I shall create! If not a note, a hole./If not an overture, a desecration.

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

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

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

A poem doesn't do everything for you._x000D_ You are supposed to go on with your thinking._x000D_ You are supposed to enrich_x000D_ the other person's poem with your extensions,_x000D_ your uniquely personal understandings,_x000D_ thus making the poem serve you.

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.

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

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.

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