Yas Bolden > Yas's Quotes

“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan

“If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.”
― June Jordan

“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.”
― June Jordan

“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”
― June Jordan

“And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies”
― Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War

“I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day.”
― Joy Harjo

“A story matrix connects all of us.
There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

“I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hate twin, but now, I don't know you as myself”
― Joy Harjo

“I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.”
― Joy Harjo, Secrets from the Center of the World (Volume 17)

“She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams.”
― Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave

“My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.”
― Joy Harjo, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond

“My father told me that some voices are so true they can be used as weapons, can maneuver the weather, change time. He said that a voice that powerful can walk away from the singer if it is shamed. After my father left us, I learned that some voices can deceive you. There is a top layer and there is a bottom, and they don't match.”
― Joy Harjo

“Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands”
― Joy Harjo

“we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with”
― Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry

“Poetry is an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said.” Inaugural poet
@TheAmandaGorman”
― Amanda Gorman

“The first bud of spring sings the other seeds into joining her uprising.”
― Amanda Gorman

“The norms and notions of what "just is' isn't always "justice".”
― Amanda Gorman

“Your silence will not protect you.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
― audre lorde

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
― audre lorde

“There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
― Audre Lorde

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.”
― Audre Lorde

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
― Audre Lorde

“I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
― August Wilson

“Have a belief in yourself that is bigger than anyone's disbelief.”
― August Wilson

“Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow. P.S. If there happens to be a multitude of griefs upon you, individual and collective, or fast and slow, or small and large, add equal parts of these considerations: that the broken heart can cover more territory. that perhaps love can only be as large as grief demands. that grief is the growing up of the heart that bursts boundaries like an old skin or a finished life. that grief is gratitude. that water seeks scale, that even your tears seek the recognition of community. that the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. that death might be the only freedom. that your grief is a worthwhile use of your time. that your body will feel only as much as it is able to. that the ones you grieve may be grieving you. that the sacred comes from the limitations. that you are excellent at loving.”
― Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds