$Gwendolyn Brooks Quote - It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.$
$Gwendolyn Brooks Quote - It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.$
$Gwendolyn Brooks Quote - It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.$
$Gwendolyn Brooks Quote - It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.$
$Gwendolyn Brooks Quote - It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.$
$Gwendolyn Brooks Quote - It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.$

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It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a ‘Negro’ fraction.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Desire Inspirational Leadership
Writing is a delicious agony.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Delicious One Liner Pain Poet Writing
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.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Believe Destroy Difference Doubt Each Other Happiness Human
One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Animal Cat Happiness Media News Reason
Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Easy Fools Fuel Grief
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Battle End Inspirational Live Song Win
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Perfume Sweet
Life for my child is simple, and is good.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Children Goodness Life Simplicity
Each body has its art.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Art Body One Liner
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
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
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
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
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Insurance Man Oneself White
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
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