black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

Gwendolyn Brooks

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
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Love Myself See Sight
I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Focus Language Myself Note Work
There are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Guide Lost Magic Scream Time
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Life Perfume Sweet
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
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Death Gold Identity Moments
The music is in minors.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Minority Music One Liner
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 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
It is brave to be involved.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Brave Initiative One Liner
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
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Chocolate Preference Truth
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
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
The poetry is myself.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Myself Poetry

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

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