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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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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Forties
Literature
Picks
Begged
White
Folks
Fifties
Language
Independent
Incense
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Flower
Lovable
Years
Poet
Sweet
Forty
Whined
Fire
Flowers
Thickly
High
Pick
More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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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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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks
When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
Gwendolyn Brooks
It is brave to be involved
Gwendolyn Brooks
I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
Gwendolyn Brooks
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Don't let anyone call you a minority if you're black or Hispanic or belong to some other ethnic group. You're not less than anybody else.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks