Life & Wisdom Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

A single line that turns relationship into physics and ethics at once. Brooks treats people not as isolated selves but as measurements: we become legible by the scale another person gives us. "Magnitude" isn’t just importance; it’s size, force, consequence. In Brooks’s hands, that word quietly rebukes the American habit of pretending the individual is self-made and self-contained. Your life gets its dimensions in the presence of other lives.

Then she knots that recognition to "bond", a term that carries tenderness and obligation in equal measure. A bond can be chosen (love, community, kinship), but it can also be imposed (debt, contract, social constraint). Brooks is too clear-eyed to let the connection read as purely sentimental. The subtext is that intimacy is also accountability: if we enlarge one another, we also owe one another.

Context matters because Brooks wrote from inside 20th-century Black urban life with a poet’s ear for how public forces press on private rooms. In poems that watch children, neighbors, veterans, lovers, the city itself becomes a web of mutual making - and mutual exposure. "We are each other's" is the key turn: it insists on reciprocity, not charity. No saviors, no spectators, no clean exit.

The line works because it compresses a social theory into human-scale music. It’s declarative without being preachy, intimate without being soft. Brooks offers a counter-myth to rugged individualism: not "I think, therefore I am", but we exist as each other’s measure and tether, enlarged and held fast by the same link.