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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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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Achieve
Playing
Wonder
Words
Wonders
Language
Fascinated
Life
Began
Became
Early
More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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My last defense / Is the present tense.
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As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
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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.
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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.
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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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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
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Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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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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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.
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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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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?
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Poetry is life distilled.
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Each body has its art.
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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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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The poetry is myself.
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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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