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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
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Forties
White
Folks
Begged
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Independent
Fifties
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More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
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
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks
I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
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
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
Gwendolyn Brooks
I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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
I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
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
Goodness begins simply with the fact of life itself.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
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
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
It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
