Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the lasting emotional impact of abortion and the memories of lost children.
Gwendolyn Brooks' quote highlights the profound grief and remembrance that accompanies the experience of abortion. It suggests that the decision to terminate a pregnancy leaves an indelible mark on one's memory and emotional landscape, as the thoughts of the potential children linger long after the choice is made.
In practice
In a discussion about reproductive rights, this quote can illustrate the emotional consequences of abortion.
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.
I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and in spite of what most people might have expected from a young girl growing up deaf, life for me was like one long episode of The Brady Bunch. Despite whatever barriers were in my way, I imagined myself as Marcia Brady skating down the street saying βhiβ to everyone, whether they knew me or not.
Things come in waves, and I'm always more interested in places like, for instance, Chicago, where people don't follow fashion. They're not galloping past your window on the way to the latest anything. They're living their lives. You do a play, they come and see it and say, 'That's nice', and then they go home.
Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.
Some people have learned to earn well but they haven't learned to live well.
Navigating a nonsober world of restaurants and bars, dinner parties, and benefits is like anything that requires practice. Like tennis or a foreign language, it gets easier the more you do it. But like all beginnings, it can be awkward. You stumble, you worry, and then there are unexpected moments of grace that give you the courage to keep going.
Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.