Quote

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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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Right
Song
Slappers
Hard
Running
Keepers
Even
Night
Battles
Always
Cannot
Harmony
Ends
Sun
Home
Battle
Live
Along
Self
Ready

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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The poetry is myself.
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Each body has its art.
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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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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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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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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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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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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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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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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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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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Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
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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Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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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I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks