We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSPoetry is life distilled.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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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.
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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 like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
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I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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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 know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
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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.
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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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Beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
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There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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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!
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Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
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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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It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
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One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.
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No man can give me any word but Wait.
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The poetry is myself.
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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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Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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Poetry is life distilled.
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Life for my child is simple, and is good.
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What, what am I to do with all of this life?
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS