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Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.

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
Begins
Goodness
Simply
Fact
Facts
Life

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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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I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
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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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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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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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The poetry is myself.
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 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.
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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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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 is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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The music is in minors.
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 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.
Gwendolyn Brooks