Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

I know all the critics.

If you believe everything you read, better not read.

Good readers make much out of little.

We must be careful what we read, and not, like the sailors of Ulysses, take bags of wind for sacks of treasure.

One must be an inventor to read well.

Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

We need discernment in what we see and what we hear and what we believe.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

I remember when I was a kid in school and teachers would explain things to me about what I read, and I'd think, Where did they get that? I didn't read that in there. Later you look at it and think, That's kind of an interesting idea.

Doubt grows with knowledge.

A critic is a reader who ruminates. Thus, he should have more than one stomach.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.

If you would judge, understand.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

You can never trust what you read.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

Speak not of what you have read, but about what you have understood.

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

Spies are great, and when you need 'em, you need 'em. But they are no substitute for insight.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

People still believe what they read is necessarily the truth.