Amanda Gorman Quotes

American poet and activist

Amanda Gorman (born 7 March 1998) is an American poet and social activist. She published the poetry book The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough in 2015, and became the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. She studied sociology at Harvard College, and graduated cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received worldwide attention with her recitation of her poem "The Hill We Climb" written for the inauguration of US President Joe Biden.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Amanda S. C. Gorman

From Wikidata (CC0)

Showing quotes in randomized order to avoid selection bias. Click Popular for most popular quotes.

We find ourselves not by being
The most seen, but the most seeing.
We watch a toddler
Freewheel through warm grass,
Not fleeing, just running, the way rivers do,
For it is in their unfettered nature.
We smile, our whole face cleared
By that single dazzling thin.
How could we not be altered.

What are we, if not what we see in another.

Jan 6: Trump supporters storm the US Capitol, leading to the deaths of five people. Somewhere a poet writes in moonless light & all at once puts her pen down.

Writing, truth-telling to one another, is an act of hope-making when hope is hardest found. What place have we in our histories except the present.

Strength is separate from survival.
What endures isn't always what escapes
& what is withered can still withstand.

A smile around here is like a sudden star, undead & loaded. To live only to die is to be doomed but redeemable. All we know so far is we are so far From what we know.

We might not be fully sure of all that we are. & yet we have endured all that we were.

our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid

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.

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.

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

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

Non-being, i.e., distance from society — social distance — is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white.

For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?

Somehow, we’ve weathered and witnessed A nation that isn’t broken, but simply
unfinished.

Perhaps pain is like a name,
Made to sing just for you.