Amanda Gorman Quotes

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

"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."

"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."

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

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.

At the end of their journey, a hero may stand in the same place where their story started, but nevertheless they have been irrevocably shifted, altered, displaced.

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

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.

Of all the stars the most beautiful Is nothing more than a monster, Just as starved & stranded as we are.

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

The closest we get to time travel Is our fears softening,

It will be a blessing if our children
Never fully grasp what
It took to come to this.
Grant them this poem
If they do forget it.
If they do, forget it.

But the point of protest isn't winning;
It's holding fast to the promise of freedom,
Even when fast victory is not promised.

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 can only fully understand language by what doesn't survive it.