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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.

Gwendolyn Brooks

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Bond Business Each Other Friendship Relationship
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
People are so in need, in need of help. People want so much that they do not know.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Help Knowledge Need People
Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Delicious One Liner Pain Poet Writing
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
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black White
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Focus Language Myself Note Work
I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Challenge Enjoyment Experience Feeling Publish Writing
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

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

Art Material Translation World
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
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Love Myself See Sight
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Death Gold Identity Moments
Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Be Yourself Imitation Important Poet Yourself
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

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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We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes