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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

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

Attention Float Head Poet 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
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Day Night Yourself
We don’t ask a flower any special reason for its existence. We just look at it and are able to accept it as being something different from ourselves.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Acceptance Different Existence Flower Ourselves Reason
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
It is brave to be involved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Initiative One Liner
To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Hand Lights Love Touch Yourself
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
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Beginning Fact Goodness Life Simplicity
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

Education Enough Inspirational Possible Writing
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Myself Philosophy Unknown
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
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Air Book Flame Flower Medicine
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

Black Expression Fight Home Oppression Project Work
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
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Health Myself Thinking

This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.

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