Amanda Gorman Quotes

If we're to live up to our own time,
then victory won't lie in the blade.
But in all the bridges we've made,
that is the promise to glade,
the hill we climb.
If only we dare.
It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
it's the past we step into
and how we repair it.

Together, we envision a land that is liberated, not lawless. We create a future that is free, not flawless. Again & again, over & over, We will stride up every mountainside, Magnanimous & modest. We will be protected & served By a force that is honored & honest. This is more than protest. It’s a promise.

We will not be slowed, come the loads, roadblocks, hills that may.

We’ll keep fulfilling this path

Until the world goes still to say:

Where there’s will, there’s women

And where there’s women

There is always a way.

Some distances, if allowed to grow,
Are merely the greatest proximities.

History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb ίστωρειν meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things — about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell — is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself. — Anne Carson

Allegedly the worst is behind us.
Still, we crouch before the lip of tomorrow

What we have lived
Remains indecipherable.
& yet we remain.
& still, we write.
& so, we write.
Watch us move above the fog
Like a promontory at dusk.
Shall this leave us biter?
Or better?

Take a knee to make a stand.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, And the norms and notions of what “just is” Isn’t always justice.

When day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry. A sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what "just is" isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

Scripture tells us to envision that: “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, And no one shall make them afraid.

Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how. In other words, we become a window pain. Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.

It will be a blessing if our children
Never fully grasp what
It took to come to this.
Grant them this poem
If they do forget it.
If they do, forget it.

Please.
Do not ask us who we are.
The hardest part of grief
Is giving it a name.

"During COVID, we've all been kept out of things. Gorman's poem eloquently lists many of the things we've been kept out of. Then she wrote -

"Kept out of,
kept in,
kept from,
kept behind,
kept below,
kept down.
Kept without life.

Some were asked to walk a fraction of our exclusion for a year and it almost destroyed all they thought they were.

Yet here we are. Still Walking. Still kept.

To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.