black
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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

Gwendolyn Brooks

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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black Color Human Room Understand White
When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Poem Start Thinking World Writing
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Believe Destroy Difference Doubt Each Other Happiness Human
No man can give me any word but Wait.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Man Patience Poet Wait Word Writing
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Goodness Health Inheritance Progress World
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 BROOKS

Fire Flower Independent Language Poet Sweet
There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Guide Lost Magic Scream Time
Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Education Important Patience Reading Slow
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Deal Devil Friendship Man Save Yourself
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Art Material Translation World
Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Delicious One Liner Pain Poet Writing
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Insurance Man Oneself White
Exhaust the little moment soon it dies.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Death Moments Time
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Achievement Beginning Early Fascinate Language Life Play Wonder Word
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Food Growth Old Yourself
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Cool Death Reality Sing

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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