Amanda Gorman Quotes

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.

A virus is fought inside us, While violence is fought amongst us. In both, our triumph is not in conquering others, But conquering the most destructive agents & instincts that we carry Within our mortal forms. Hate is a virus. A virus demands a body. What we mean is: Hate only survives when hosted in humans. If we are to give it anything, Let it be our sorrow & never our skin. To love just may be The fight of our lives.

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

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.

To be American is to be a kin To a courageous hope: The trust that even if just for a moment We can, we must, close rank as people, One heart, one voice, one mind, created equal.

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

As kids we sat in grass, Fished our hands into the dirt. We felt that damp brown Universe writhe, alert & alive, Earth cupped in the boat of our palms.

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

Every second, what we feel
For our people & our planet
Almost brings us to our knees,
A compassion that nearly destroys
Us with its massiveness.
There is no love for or in this world
That doesn't feel both bright & unbearable,
Uncarriable.

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

We write
Because you might listen.

We forget this immensity, it will still be ours, for we wrote such mysteries down: we did the thing others dared not. We collected all the dazzling & dangerous & dreamed aches, scrapped them, though we did not yet have words by which to map them.

For it’s our grief that gives us our gratitude, Shows us how to find hope, if we ever lose it. So ensure that this ache wasn’t endured in vain: Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.

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.

Anxiety is a living body,
Poised beside us like a shadow.
It is the last creature standing,
The only beast who loves us
Enough to stay.