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

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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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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Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
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The poetry is myself.
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It is brave to be involved
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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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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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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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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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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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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?
Gwendolyn Brooks
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks