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

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
Imitate
Poets
Poet
Important

More quotes by Gwendolyn Brooks

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When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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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Truth-tellers are not always palatable. There is a preference for candy bars.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Live not for Battles Won. Live not for The-End-of-the-Song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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The music is in minors.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Poetry is life distilled.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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
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Good health is a duty to yourself, to your contemporaries, to your inheritors, to the progress of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Life must be aromatic. There must be scent, somehow there must be some.
Gwendolyn Brooks