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

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
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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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Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
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It is brave to be involved
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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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My last defense / Is the present tense.
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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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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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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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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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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
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The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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And if sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks