Amanda Gorman Quotes

A film is not what happened, a film is an impression of what happened. — Dustin Lance Black

We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms 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.

The crescent moon, The night’s lucent lesion. We are felled oaks beneath it, Branches full of empty. Look closer. What we share is more Than what we’ve shed.

So while once we asked: How could we
possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert: How could catastrophe
possibly prevail over us?

That even as we grieved, we grew, That even as we hurt, we hoped, That even as we tired, we tried. That we’ll forever be tied together.

Our goal is never revenge, just restoration. Not dominance, just dignity. Not fear, just freedom. Just justice.

Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free. Empires have been raised & razed on much less. There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained & unexploded. Grief is the grenade that always goes off.

When asking how others were faring
We did not expect an honest or full response.
What words can answer how we're remaining alive?

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried

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 became paid professionals of pain, Specialists in suffering, Aces of the ache, Masters of the moan.

Loss is the cost of loving

This poem & its pain are both imagined & as real as we are. That is to say, through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some. Even without living it, a memory can live on in us. The past is never gone, just not yet found. 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.

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

The truth is, we are one nation, under fraud.