Amanda Gorman Quotes

For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Since the world is round
There is no way to walk away
From each other, for even then
We are coming back together.

To put it plain / we have shipwrecked the earth / soiled the soil / & run the ground aground. / Listen. We are the loud toll / on this planet. / Our future needs us / alarmed. Man is a myth / in the making.

Perhaps to burn is the most basic
Purification there is.
Time said: You must transform to survive.
We said: Not over our dead body.
What can we call a country that destroys
Itself just because it can?
A nation that would char
Rather than change?
Our only word for this is
Home.

We cannot possess hope without practicing it. It is the most fundamental craft we demand of ourselves.

What are we, if not what we see in another.

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid.
The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

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.

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because 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.

The hardest part of grief
Is giving it a name.
The pain pulls us apart,
Like lips about to speak.
Without language nothing can live
At all, let alone
Beyond itself.

Lost as we feel, there is no better
Compass than compassion.
We find ourselves not by being
The most seen, but the most seeing.

Sometimes, we must call our monster out from under the bed to see he/she/it carries our face.

Non-being, i.e., distance from society, social distance is the very heritage of the oppressed.

Which means to the oppressor that social distance is a humiliation.

It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less than white.

How we are moved says everything
About what we are to each other.

While we might feel small, separate, and all alone, our people have never been more tightly tethered. The question’s not if we will weather this unknown, but how we will weather the unknown together.

And the norms and notions of what “just is”
Isn’t always justice.