Quote

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

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
Books
Flames
Reading
Flight
Book
Meat
Stitch
Clouds
Clout
Medicine
Stitches
Healing
Cloud
Air
Flame
Flower
Steel

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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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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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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A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.
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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.
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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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The music is in minors.
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I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.
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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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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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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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Poetry is life distilled.
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Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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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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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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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 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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