Quote

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

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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
Sometimes
Understanding
Racism
White
Awareness
Often
Meet
Black
Beings
Two
Room
Chiefly
Today
Color
Encounter
Human
Rooms
Colors
Humans
Ready
Encounters

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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?
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Writing is a delicious agony.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
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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.
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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
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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.
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We are each other's magnitude and bond.
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The poetry is myself.
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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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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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As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
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