Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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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Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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 -
It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
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Poetry is life distilled.
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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
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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.
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I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
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Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS






