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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
Years
Poet
Lovable
Sweet
Forty
Fire
Flowers
Whined
High
Pick
Thickly
Literature
Picks
Forties
White
Folks
Begged
Language
Independent
Fifties
Find
Flower
Incense
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
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks
at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
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
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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
It is brave to be involved
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
The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
And if sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?
Gwendolyn Brooks
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Poetry is life distilled.
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
