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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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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Streets
Housing
Expression
Halls
Fighting
Poems
Take
Relevant
Work
Manner
Project
Tavern
Street
Taverns
Projects
Blacks

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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.
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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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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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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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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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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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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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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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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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Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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The poetry is myself.
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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Poetry is life distilled.
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I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
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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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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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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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