Sonia Sanchez > Quotes

“Come windless invader
I am a carnival of
Stars, a poem of blood.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess being a student, growing and learning something new every day. The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“Let me wear the day
Well so when it reaches you
You will enjoy it.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“your hands
humming hurricanes
of beauty.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Morning Haiku

“what i need is traveling

minds talktouch kisses spittouch

you swimming upstream.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“How to dance
in blood and
remain sane?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Morning Haiku

“Your days still half-opened, crackle like the fires to come. Outside. The earth. Wind. Night. Unfold for you. Listen to their sounds. They have sung me seasons that never abandoned me.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“but i am what i
am. woman. alone
amid all this noise.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“I write to keep in contact with our ancestors and to spread truth to people.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“i gather up
each sound
you left behind
and stretch them
on our bed.
each nite
i breathe you
and become high.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“3.
i have told
you my name
so there is
tomorrow.

4.
see me through
your own eyes
i am here.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“if i had known, if
i had known you, i would have
left my love at home.

-Haiku”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“(once upon an afternoon
i became still-life
i carried a balloon
and a long black knife.)”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Haiku [For you]
love between us is
speech and breath. loving you is
a long river running”
― Sonia Sanchez

“I probably have not killed anyone in America because I write, I've maintained good controls over myself by writing.”
― Sonia Sanchez

“Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Girl don’t you know yet that you don’t never give up on love? Don’t you know you has in you the pulse of winds? The noise of dragonflies?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“your face like
summer lightning
gets caught in my voice
and i draw you up from deep rivers
taste your face of a thousand names
see you smile
a new season
hear your voice
a wild sea pausing in the wind”
― Sonia Sanchez, Homegirls and Handgrenades

“Is she a writer too, ma?"

"No, honey. She's a lady who has lived life instead of writing about it.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Homegirls and Handgrenades

“No. Don’t never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It’ll come. Like the rain fallin’ from the heaven, it’ll come. Just don’t never give up on love.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“you, man, will you remember me when i die?
will you stare and stain my death and say
i saw her dancen among swallows
far from the world’s obscenities?
you, man, will you remember and cry?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“The news of [James Baldwin's] death reached me in Trinidad around midnight. I was lecturing in the country about African-American literature and liberation, longevity and love, commitment and courage. I could not sleep. I got up and walked out of my hotel room into a night filled with stars. And I sat down in the park and talked to him. About the world. About his work. How grateful we all are that he walked on the earth, that he breathed, that he preached, that he came toward us baptizing us with his holy words. And some of us were saved because of him. Harlem man. Genius. Piercing us with his eyes and his pen.

How to write of this beautiful big-eyed man who took on the country with his words? How to make anyone understand his beauty in a country that hates Blacks?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“I shall become a collector of me and put meat on my soul”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“For we the people will always be arriving
a ceremony of thunder
waking up the earth
opening our eyes to human
monuments.
And it'll get better
it'll get better
if we the people work, organize, resist,
come together for peace, racial, social
and sexual justice
it'll get better
it'll get better.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Today, home from Trinidad, I thank James Arthur Baldwin for his legacy of fire. A fine rain of words when we had no tongues. He set fire to our eyes. Made a single look, gesture endure. Made a people meaningful and moral. Responsible finally for all our sweet and terrible lives.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“i told them that men and women are measured by their acts not by their swaggering speech or walk, or the money they have stashed between their legs.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“i saw you
vincent van
gogh perched
on those pennsylvania
cornfields communing
amid secret black
bird societies. yes.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“When I first saw [James Baldwin] on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America's contradictions transformed his face into a warrior's face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Where there are many men
without honor, there will always be some others who
bear in themselves the honor of many men.”
― Sonia Sanchez, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story