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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
Age
Fraction
Would
Fractions
Negro
Fifty
Racism
Died
Realize
Realizing
Frightens
More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
My last defense / Is the present tense.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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?
Gwendolyn Brooks
at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
This is the urgency: Live! and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.
Gwendolyn Brooks
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
Gwendolyn Brooks
The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
We are each other's magnitude and bond.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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
Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
Gwendolyn Brooks
