It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSWhen you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
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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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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
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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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The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the ’60s: Independent fire!
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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And if sun comes how shall we greet him? shall we not dread him, shall we not fear him after so lengthy a session with shade?
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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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Poetry is life distilled.
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There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
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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.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS






