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Gwendolyn Brooks
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“Abortions will not let you forget. / You remember the children you got that you did not get ...”
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“But who walks with Him? — dares to take His arm, / To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear, / Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer, / Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?”
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“... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.”
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“No man can give me any word but Wait ...”
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“I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.”
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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.”
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“What shall I give my children? who are poor, / Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land ...”
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“Exhaust the little moment / Soon it dies.”
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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.”
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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?”
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“There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.”
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“... dandelions were what she chiefly saw. Yellow jewels for everyday, studding the patched green dress of her back yard.”
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“What she wanted was to donate to the world a good Maud Martha. That was the offering, the bit of art, that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that.”
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“... she was learning to love moments. To love moments for themselves.”
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“She had a tremendous impatience with other people's ideas — unless those happened to be exactly like hers; even then, often as not, she gave a hurried, almost angry, affirmative, and flew on to emphatic illuminations of her own.”
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“We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.”
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“My last defense / Is the present tense.”
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“To be in love / Is to touch things with a lighter hand.”
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“One reason cats are happier than people / is that they have no newspapers ... ”
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“This is the urgency: Live! / and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind.”
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“... beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.”
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“And I ride ride I ride on to the end — ... / To fail, to flourish, to wither or to win. / We lurch, distribute, we extend, begin.”
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“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.”
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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.”
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“I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black.”
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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 ...”
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“As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.”
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“Poetry is life distilled.”
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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.”
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“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.”
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“The poetry is myself.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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“... at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.”
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“Gimme an upsweep, Minnie, / With humpteen baby curls, / 'Bout time I got some glamour, / I'll show them girls.”
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“Maud went to college, / Sadie stayed at home. / Sadie scraped life / With a fine-tooth comb.”
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“We are each other's harvest / we are each other's business: / we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
Gwendolyn Brooks, U.S. poet, educator, writer
(1917 - 2000)
Full name: Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks Blakely.