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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.

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
Refining
Translation
Translations
Materials
Art
World
Evocative

More quotes by 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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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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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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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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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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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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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
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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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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
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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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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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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at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
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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My last defense / Is the present tense.
Gwendolyn Brooks