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.
All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.
Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure.
I was burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes,_x000D_ _x000D_ blown out on the trail; hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn, _x000D_ _x000D_ "Come in," she said, "I'll give ya shelter from the storm."
Life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or of a longer life, are not necessary.
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