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 BROOKSI am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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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.
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We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
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What, what am I to do with all of this life?
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To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
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Reading is important – read between the lines. Don’t swallow everything.
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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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I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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It is brave to be involved. To be not fearful to be unresolved.
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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.
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It is brave to be involved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS -
Sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
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Each body has its art.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS