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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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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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The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
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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It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry. ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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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My last defense / Is the present tense.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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It is brave to be involved
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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
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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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The poetry is myself.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
Gwendolyn Brooks