Julian Aguon > Quotes

“If we are quiet enough, we can hear it: the space between us filling up fast with all the things we are too afraid to say to each other.”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation

“But then again maybe a country that routinely prefers power over strength, and living over letting live, is no country for eight-spot butterflies.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“Adulthood is when we discover who we are. It's when we figure out some really important stuff-like what our strengths and weaknesses are, what our unique individual gifts are. Also, what shortcomings we must mitigate. It's when go through that very important process of introspection, soul-searching, self-discovery. If we do not go though this process, we inevitably become unhappy people who wake up in the morning, empty, afraid, and unfulfilled.”
― Julian Aguon, The Properties of Perpetual Light

“Part of our work as people who dare to believe we can save the world is to prepare our wills to withstand some losing, so that we may lose and still set out again.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“What we love we can save, including each other, even when we are afraid.”
― Julian Aguon

“There have been periods in my own life when my grief felt more real to me than my hope, moments when my rage, sitting up, threatened to swallow my softness forever. It is here, in these moments, in these fields where older versions of myself come to die, that I am forced again to clarify what exactly it is that I believe.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“You will be prodded, pushed. Tested. You will be bumped up against the Great Wall of Uncertainty again and again-the question on the tongue of the universe always the same-who are you?”
― Julian Aguon, The Properties of Perpetual Light

“Because eyes wide with wonder is a perfectly good definition of magic. Because magic could just as easily mean stargazing, in the midday sun, while looking down. Because we had so little, yet somehow, we had it all.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“talk about how reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist recalibrated my thinking about what it means to be a self-actualized adult—and what it takes to become one. In the speech, I tell the graduates that the only way to successfully make the journey (from adolescence to adulthood) is to learn how to “get quiet”—that is, to quiet down the noise of other people’s opinions and to take instruction instead from one’s own heart.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“All of us—whether we choose to become human rights lawyers or corporate counsel, or choose never to practice law at all but instead become professors or entrepreneurs or disappear anonymous among the poor or stay at home and raise bright, delicious children—all of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“That when we are in pain, we inflict pain. That when we feel we can no longer breathe, we grab other peoples’ air.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“Waiting is
Empire's
favorite game
of all

and patience
a parka
of loneliness

to wear on
an island with
no chance of
snow”
― Julian Aguon, The Properties of Perpetual Light

“In Guam, even the dead are dying.”
― Julian Aguon

“That the life of a healer was always hers to have because she was born breech under a new moon and thus had the hands for healing.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“We need not worry, our leaders tell us. We are a resilient people. We need only summon that strength now. Will someone please tell them that resilience is not a thing to be trotted out in trying times like a kind of prized pony? As the gifted Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat puts it, just because people are resilient doesn't mean they can suffer more than others.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“The first thing I found was a family of tree snails, which I’d spend hours watching, wondering why they moved so slowly, wondering if they could, if they had to, move swiftly enough to save their own lives. I found so many things after that. I found I could slide down the smaller slopes at the back of my house if I had just the right piece of cardboard. I found out the hard way that before one runs through an open field of sword grass, one should wear a long-sleeved shirt. I found no need for a bike. I found butterflies in abundance. I found more grasshoppers than I could count. I studied them closely, that is, when they’d let me get close. I was awed by how far their little legs could take them. I couldn’t for the life of me fathom how such small legs could support such big hops. I wondered endlessly about wings. I was envious of everything that could fly. I prayed, without knowing how to, for wings of my own.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot...But the nastier lesson their schools taught was that their dreams were ours. That indigenous knowledge had no place in the new world...As vehicles for our assimilation, American schools have attached to our longings alien aspirations for material wealth, money and power. How much of our creativity and our vision has already been laid to waste for the sake of these?”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation

“The house where words were shouted not spoken. The house that was never a home.”
― Julian Aguon, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies: A Lyric Essay

“What I want to tell you today is this: Get quiet. In each of you, there is a whisper that speaks of a special, unduplicated gift that you alone passes and are meant to bring forth into the world Attend to that whisper. Jesus said: If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you. I dare to add-if you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save other people too”
― Julian Aguon, The Properties of Perpetual Light

“These days the integrity of our small but ancient civilization is endangered by the excesses of a country whose wartime budget is larger than that of the other nine leading military powers of the world, combined.”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation

“Armament will lead only to more armament. To believe otherwise is to set out on a path that will only make final the defeat of humanity.”
― Julian Aguon, The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation