Amanda Gorman Quotes

American poet and activist

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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.

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Alternative Names: Amanda S. C. Gorman

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& tell us: what is the hour
But a rotation by which we mark our grief

When this ends, we’ll smile sweetly, finally seeing In testing times, we became the best of beings.

How we are moved says everything
About what we are to each other.

What is now dust will not return, / not the beloveds / nor their breath, / nor the sugar-crumbling glaciers, / nor the crows chewing / on their own soured song, / nor all the species / slashed / down / in one smogged swoop.

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

Not because we will never again know
defeat, But because we will never again sow
division.

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.

The hill we climb, if only we dare it: Because being American is more than a pride we inherit — It’s the past we step into, and how we repair it.

Welcome back to the wild (advertisement for a zoo)
Watch movies like they were meant to be seen (advertisement for a movie theater)

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.

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.

As far away as it is, the late sun looks peelable in our palm. That is to say, distance renders all massiveness carriable.

CALL US Grant us this day Bruising the make of us. At times over half of our bodies Are not our own, Our persons made vessel For non-human cells. To them we are A boat of a being, Essential. A country, A continent, A planet. A human Microbiome is all the writhing forms on & inside this body Drafted under our life. We are not me — We are we. Call us What we carry.

through some fictions we find fact; in some fantasies we discover ourselves & then some.

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. This is to say, there does exist A good grief.