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Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes
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We do not want them to have less.
But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough.
We drive on, we drive on.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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?
Gwendolyn Brooks
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What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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The good man.
He is still enhancer, renouncer.
In the time of detachment,
in the time of the vivid heather and affectionate evil,
in the time of oral
grave grave legalities of hate - all real
walks our prime registered reproach and seal.
Our successful moral.
The good man.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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What shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Gimme an upsweep, Minnie,
With humpteen baby curls,
'Bout time I got some glamour,
I'll show them girls.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Reading is very important—read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Sometimes you have to deal
Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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People like definite decisions,
Tidy answers, all the little ravelings
Snipped off, the lint removed, they
Hop happily among their roughs
Calling what they can't clutch insanity
Or saintliness.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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At a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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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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It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.
Gwendolyn Brooks
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Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.
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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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Gwendolyn Brooks
Born:
June 7, 1917
Died:
December 3, 2000
(aged 83)
Bio:
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet and teacher. She was the first black person to win a Pulitzer prize when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her second collection, Annie Allen.
Known for:
Annie Allen (1949)
Maud Martha (1953)
In the Mecca; Poems (1968)
Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)
The Bean Eaters (1960)
Most used words:
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night
people
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sing
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day
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big
rudolph
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reed
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Gwendolyn Brooks on Wikipedia
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