Quote

I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Black
Must
Emphasis
Racism
White

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

Image
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
Image
at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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
Image
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
Image
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
I don't like the idea of the black race being diluted out of existence. I like the idea of all of us being here.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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
Image
The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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