Amanda Gorman Quotes

Erasure demands a lifetime of rehearsal. Do you really understand what it is to be this disposable body. We recognize the sobs now for the flags they were. The jerk of our heads, as if waking from a dream — or a nightmare. You decide. This is not the nation we built, at most not the nation we've known. Know. Oh, no. This is the nation we've sewn. It is our right to weep for the wound we've always been. A silent shock out of the blue: a hand hung to another or a head pillowed by a shoulder is by far worth more than anything we've won or wanted. When told we can't make a difference, we'll still make a sound.

Take a knee to make a stand.

The future isn’t attained. It is atoned, until It is at one with history, Until home is more than memory, Until we can hold near Who we hold dear.

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.

Our country, which we do not
forsake for being un-great, that
we should find by being good.

This feeling might be pain, poetry, or both. But at least it is no lie. Ignorance isn’t bliss. Ignorance is to miss: to block ourselves from seeing sky.

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 march back to what was,
But move to what shall be:
A country that is bruised but whole,
Benevolent but bold.
Fierce and free.

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

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

Love the earth / like we've failed it. To put it plain / we have shipwrecked the earth [...] Listen. [...] / Our future nedds us / alarmed. Man is a myth / in the making. / What is now dust will not return, / not the beloveds / nor their breath [...] / Extinction is a chorus / of quiet punching / that same note.

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 days, we just need a place where we can bleed in peace. Our only word for this is poem.

We are desperate to flatten the curve. Oh, how we miss curving into each other.

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