127 Quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

Well, life has been a baffled vehicleAnd baffling. But she fights, andHas fought, according to her lights andThe lenience of her whirling-place.She fights with semi-folded arms,Her strong bag, and the stiffFrost of her face (that challenges "When" and "If.")And altogether she does Rather Well.

Books are meat and medicineand flame and flight and flowersteel, stitch, cloud and clout,and drumbeats on the air.

Surely--But I am very off from that.From surely. From indeed. From the decent arrowthat was my clean naivete and my faith.This morning, men deliver wounds and death.They will deliver death and wounds tomorrow.And I doubt all. You. Or a violet.

It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates.And Mabbie was all of seven.And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar. And Mabbie thought life was heaven.

People who have no children can be hard: Attain a mail of ice and insolence:

Ifyou scream, you're marked "insane."But silence is a place in which to scream!

Hateful things sometimes befall the hatefulbut the hateful are not rendered lovable thereby.

Since a man must bringTo music what his mother spanked him forWhen he was two: bits of forgotten hate,Devotion: whether or not his mattress hurts:The little dream his father humored: the thingHis sister did for money: what he ateFor breakfast—and for dinner twenty yearsAgo last autumn: all his skipped desserts.

You are the beautiful halfof a golden hurt.