Quotes by June Jordan

“and if iif i ever let love gobecause the hatred and the whisperingsbecome a phantom dictate i o-bey in lieu of impulse and realities(the blossoming flamingos of mywild mimosa trees)then let love fr...”

“I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life de...”

“And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or ...”

“... mommahelp meturn the face of historyto your face.- Getting Down To Get Over - Dedicated To My Mother”

“A man is not a tree'...If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.”

“To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.”

“Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.”

“But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.”

“So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our...”

“The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.”

“Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?”

“That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.”

“Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window...”

“And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for”

“I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive. ...”

“I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak....”

“If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the ma...”

“Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.”

“I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.”

“If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.”