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Poetry is life distilled.

Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Distilled
Poetry
Life

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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My last defense / Is the present tense.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, `Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about.’ With all that's going on, how could I stop?
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night. You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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It is brave to be involved
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Each body has its art.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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!
Gwendolyn Brooks