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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The poetry is myself.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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It is brave to be involved
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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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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?
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
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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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
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!
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
Gwendolyn Brooks