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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.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

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I Who Have Gone

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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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.

Truth-tellers Are Not Always Palatable. There Is A Preference For Candy Bars.

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.

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!

We Real Cool. We Left School. We Lurk Late. We Strike Straight. We Sing Sin. We Thin Gin. We Jazz June. We Die Soon.

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.

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.

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.

I Know That The Black Emphasis Must Be Not Against White But For Black.

Reading Is Important - Read Between The Lines. Don't Swallow Everything.

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.

Books Are Meat And Medicine And Flame And Flight And Flower Steel, Stitch, Cloud And Clout, And Drumbeats On The Air.

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.

One Reason Cats Are Happier Than People Is That They Have No Newspapers.

The Music Is In Minors.

We Are Each Other's Magnitude And Bond.

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.

I Think There Are Things For All Of Us To Do As Long As We're Here And We're Healthy.

To Be In Love Is To Touch Things With A Lighter Hand. In Yourself You Stretch, You Are Well.

My Last Defense / Is The Present Tense.

Live In The Moment

I Think It Must Be Lonely To Be God. Nobody Loves A Master. No.

Even If You Are Not Ready For Day It Cannot Always Be Night.

Be Yourself. Don't Imitate Other Poets. You Are As Important As They Are.

With Melted Opals For My Milk, Pearl-leaf For My Cracker.

It Frightens Me To Realize That, If I Had Died Before The Age Of Fifty, I Would Have Died A 'negro' Fraction.

I Swear To Keep The Dead Upon My Mind, / Disdain For All Time To Be Overglad.

Words Can Do Wonderful Things. They Pound, Purr. They Can Urge, They Can Wheedle, Whip, Whine. They Can Sing, Sass, Singe. They Can Churn, Check, Channelize. They Can Be A "hup Two Three Four." They Can Forge A Fiery Army Of A Hundred Languid Men.

I Felt That I Had To Write. Even If I Had Never Been Published, I Knew That I Would Go On Writing, Enjoying It And Experiencing The Challenge.

There Are No Magics Or Elves / Or Timely Godmothers To Guide Us. We Are Lost, Must / Wizard A Track Through Our Own Screaming Weed.

I Like The Concentration, The Crush; I Like Working With Language, As Others Like Working With Clay, Or Notes.

What Shall I Give My Children? Who Are Poor, / Who Are Adjudged The Leastwise Of The Land...

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.

When I Start Writing A Poem, I Don't Think About Models Or About What Anybody Else In The World Has Done.

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.

Already I Am No Longer Looked At With Lechery Or Love.

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.

The Poetry Is Myself.

It Is Brave To Be Involved. To Be Not Fearful To Be Unresolved.

I Believe We Should All Know Each Other, We Human Carriers Of So Many Pleasurable Differences. To Not Know Is To Doubt, To Shrink From, Sidestep Or Destroy.

Art Is A Refining And Evocative Translation Of The Materials Of The World.

Exhaust The Little Moment. Soon It Dies. And Be It Gash Or Gold It Will Not Come Again In This Identical Guise.

What, What Am I To Do With All Of This Life?

I've Always Thought Of Myself As A Reporter.

I Don't Like The Idea Of The Black Race Being Diluted Out Of Existence. I Like The Idea Of All Of Us Being Here.

It Is Brave To Be Involved

Goodness Begins Simply With The Fact Of Life Itself.

Poetry Is Life Distilled.

She Was Learning To Love Moments. To Love Moments For Themselves.

Learning To Love

As You Get Older, You Find That Often The Wheat, Disentangling Itself From The Chaff, Comes Out To Meet You.

Good Health Is A Duty To Yourself, To Your Contemporaries, To Your Inheritors, To The Progress Of The World.

I Am A Writer Perhaps Because I Am Not A Talker.

We Are Each Other's Harvest; We Are Each Other's Business; We Are Each Other's Magnitude And Bond.

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.

Beware The Easy Griefs / That Fool And Fuel Nothing.

Life Must Be Aromatic. There Must Be Scent, Somehow There Must Be Some.

This Is The Urgency: Live! And Have Your Blooming In The Noise Of The Whirlwind.

Live Not For Battles Won. Live Not For The-end-of-the-song. Live In The Along.

Life For My Child Is Simple, And Is Good.

Abortions Will Not Let You Forget. You Remember The Children You Got That You Did Not Get.

Do Not Desire To Fit In. Desire To Oblige Yourselves To Lead.

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.

Nothing Could Stop Mississippi.

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?

A Poem Doesn't Do Everything For You. You Are Supposed To Go On With Your Thinking. You Are Supposed To Enrich The Other Person's Poem With Your Extensions, Your Uniquely Personal Understandings, Thus Making The Poem Serve You.

First Fight. Then Fiddle.

At A Certain Moment In Social Proceedings, I Am On Fire To Leave: I Have A Leaving-fit.

... Sometimes You Have To Deal / Devilishly With Drowning Men In Order To Swim Them To Shore.

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.

Writing Is A Delicious Agony.

No Man Can Give Me Any Word But Wait.

When You Use The Term Minority Or Minorities In Reference To People, You're Telling Them That They're Less Than Somebody Else.

Do Not Be Afraid Of No, Who Has So Far, So Very Far To Go.

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?

Exhaust The Little Moment / Soon It Dies.

Live In The Moment

There Can Be No Whiter Whiteness Than This One: An Insurance Man's Shirt On Its Morning Run.

Be Careful What You Swallow. Chew!

African American

Words Of Wisdom

Very Early In Life I Became Fascinated With The Wonders Language Can Achieve. And I Began Playing With Words.

I Am Interested In Telling My Particular Truth As I Have Seen It.

We Don't Ask A Flower Any Special Reason For Its Existence. We Just Look At It And Are Able To Accept It As Being Something Different From Ourselves.

Art Hurts. Art Urges Voyages - And It Is Easier To Stay At Home.

I Shall Create! If Not A Note, A Hole./if Not An Overture, A Desecration.

Each Body Has Its Art.

People Are So In Need, In Need Of Help. People Want So Much That They Do Not Know.

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