When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSVery early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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What, what am I to do with all of this life?
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Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
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I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.
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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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One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
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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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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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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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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
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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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It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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No man can give me any word but Wait.
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
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I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
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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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When 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.
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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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I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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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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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 BROOKS