black
grey
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brown
white

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Children Death Forget Remember Yourself
It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Character Fear
Poetry is life distilled.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life One Liner Poetry
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
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
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

Cool Death Reality Sing
I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Deep God Lonely Love Master Thinking
The poetry is myself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Myself Poetry
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Death Mindset Myself Remember Time
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
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
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
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
Each body has its art.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Art Body One Liner
It is brave to be involved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Initiative One Liner
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?
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Come Fear Greet Himself Session Sun
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Insurance Man Oneself White
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
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
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Chocolate Preference Truth
When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Poem Start Thinking World Writing
I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Interest Myself See Truth
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Live Noise Urgent World Yourself
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Love Myself See Sight
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
A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Education Enough Inspirational Possible Writing
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Beginning Fact Goodness Life Simplicity

I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

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I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we’re here and we’re healthy.

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Popular Authors

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