Amanda Gorman Quotes

& what we share is the bark, the bones. Paleontologists, from one fossilized femur, Can dream up a species, Make believe a body Where there was none. Our remnants are revelation, Our requiem as raptus. When we bend into dirt We’re truth preserved Without our skin.

We were told to never use I when writing, because eliminating this voice makes arguments legitimate. But we realize there is nothing that convinces like the self does - our life, our body & its beating, proving its own jagged point.

Since the world is round, There is no way to walk away From each other, for even then We are coming back together. Some distances, if allowed to grow, Are merely the greatest proximities.

"What is called "great"
Is often grievous & gruesome,
But what is good is worth our words,
Good trouble.
Good fight.
Good will.
Good people.
To be good is to be larger than war.
It is to be more than great."

To be haunted is to be hunted
By a history that is still hurting,
Needing healing as much as we do.

Our whole year swallowed, As if by a massive maw. What else could stomach Our hearts, huge with hurt, Everyone & everything hell

The only way to correctly predict The future is to pave it, Is to brave it. The breakage is where we begin. The rupture is for remembering.

Meaning, we cannot stand up to police If we cannot cease policing our imagination, Convincing our communities that this won’t work, When the work hasn’t even begun, That this can wait, When we’ve already waited out a thousand suns. By now, we understand That white supremacy & the despair it demands Are as destructive as any disease.

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.

There is no simple way to hurt. The real damage is dammed, disrupted. :Inaudible: We must change This ending in every way. * * * Disease is physiological death, Loneliness is a social one, Where the old We collapses like a lung. * * * Some days, we just need a place Where we can bleed in peace. Our only word for this is Poem.

"Good Grief

The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist
A good grief.

The hurt is how we know
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.

All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters — Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine."

There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to see it.
There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to be it.

To tell the truth, then, is to risk
being remembered by its fiction.

But tomorrow isn’t revealed, Rather rendered, refined. Wrought. Remember that fate isn’t fought Against. It is fought for. Again & again.

I can hear change humming
In its loudest, proudest song.
I don’t fear change coming,
And so I sing along.