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!
GWENDOLYN BROOKSDo not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
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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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There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
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We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
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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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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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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 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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Exhaust the little moment soon it dies.
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Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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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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It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
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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 swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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What, what am I to do with all of this life?
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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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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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS