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 BROOKSThis is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Exhaust the little moment soon it dies.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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 -
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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 -
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
No man can give me any word but Wait.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS