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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.

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
Realizing
Frightens
Age
Fraction
Would
Fractions
Negro
Fifty
Racism
Died
Realize

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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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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at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
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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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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
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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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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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My last defense / Is the present tense.
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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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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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I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, `Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about.’ With all that's going on, how could I stop?
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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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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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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
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Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I think it must be lonely to be God. Nobody loves a master. No.
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I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
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This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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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