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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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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Writing
Think
Thinking
Poem
World
Models
Anybody
Start
Else
Done

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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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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Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
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My last defense / Is the present tense.
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.
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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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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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Poetry is life distilled.
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 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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The music is in minors.
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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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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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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.
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