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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSDon’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
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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.
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When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.
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I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
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I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
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I don’t like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.
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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
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When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.
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One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
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Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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I believe we should all know each other, we human carriers of so many pleasurable differences. To not know is to doubt, to shrink from, sidestep or destroy.
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Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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It is brave to be involved.
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
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When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
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I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.
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We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS