Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
GWENDOLYN BROOKSEach body has its art.
More Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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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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Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
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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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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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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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I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
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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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To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
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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.
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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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I like the concentration, the crush; I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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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.
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I felt that I had to write. Even if I had never been published, I knew that I would go on writing, enjoying it and experiencing the challenge.
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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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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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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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Life for my child is simple, and is good.
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
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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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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
GWENDOLYN BROOKS