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When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

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

Black Existence Ideas Myself Race
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Blue Body Himself Love Man Rich Right Sweet Water World
I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Black White
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Deal Devil Friendship Man Save Yourself
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
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Myself Philosophy Unknown
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
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
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Desire Inspirational Leadership
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
It is brave to be involved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Initiative One Liner
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
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Death Mindset Myself Remember Time
Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Afraid Journey Path Travel
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

Hard Mistake Myself Talk Writing
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Day Night Yourself

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

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When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you’re telling them that they’re less than somebody else.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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