Quote

Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.

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
Imitate
Poets
Poet
Important

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

Image
Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
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
Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
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
Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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.
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
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
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
Image
She was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
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
Image
Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Image
Writing is a delicious agony.
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
As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks