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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
Project
Tavern
Street
Taverns
Projects
Blacks
Streets
Housing
Expression
Halls
Fighting
Poems
Take
Relevant
Work
Manner

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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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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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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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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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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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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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Writing is a delicious agony.
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
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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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It is brave to be involved
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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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The poetry is myself.
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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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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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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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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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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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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