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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.

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
Desire
Oblige
Fit
Lead
Leadership

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.
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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Each body has its art.
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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Writing is a delicious agony.
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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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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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 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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When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
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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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
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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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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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It is brave to be involved
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