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 BROOKSWhen 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.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
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Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
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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?
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I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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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.
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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
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There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
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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.
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Don’t let anyone call you a minority if you’re black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You’re not less than anybody else.
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS






