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

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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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.
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
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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!
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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.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
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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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It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.
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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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It is brave to be involved
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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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The music is in minors.
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She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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Each body has its art.
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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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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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