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

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

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

Image
Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
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
Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.
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
Image
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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
It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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
Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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
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
Each body has its art.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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