Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
Gwendolyn BrooksRead
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
Interpretation
Books serve as essential nourishment for the mind and spirit.
In this quote, Gwendolyn Brooks emphasizes the multifaceted nature of books, comparing them to various vital elements of life. She highlights how literature nourishes the mind, fosters growth, inspires creativity, and connects us through shared experiences, suggesting that books are as essential to our existence as food, medicine, and art.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a speech on the importance of reading in education.
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.
Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.
The art of reading is to skip judiciously.
Competitive skills are desperately needed by poor children in America, and realistic recognition of the economic roles that they may someday have an opportunity to fill is obviously important, too. But there is more to life, and there ought to be much more to childhood, than readiness for economic functions.
Capture your reader, let him not depart, from dull beginnings that refuse to start
The part of my education that has had the deepest influence wasn't any particular essay or even a specific class, it was how I was able to apply everything I learned in the library to certain situations in my life. . . The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.
We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.
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