June Jordan Quotes

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?

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

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

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

If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.

South Africa used to seem so far away. Then it came home to me. It began to signify the meaning of white hatred here. That was what the sheets and the suits and the ties covered up, not very well. That was what the cowardly guys calling me names from their speeding truck wanted to happen to me, to all of me: to my people. That was what would happen to me if I walked around the corner into the wrong neighborhood. That was Birmingham. That was Brooklyn. That was Reagan. That was the end of reason. South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.

In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

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 I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

Behold the heart and mind of Angela Davis: open, relentless, and on time! She is as radiant, she is as true, as that invincible sunrise she means means means to advance With all of the faith and all of the grace of her entirely devoted life.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.

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.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

... the histories of Blacks and Jews in bondage and out of bondage, have been blood histories pursued through our kindred searchings for self-determination. Let this blood be a stain of honor that we share. Let us not now become enemies to ourselves and to each other.

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

The thing about genius is it will never yield to circumstances. Genius regards what's given as the beginning of its need to find or devise something else.

What tyranny could exceed a tyranny that dictates to the human heart?

To believe is to become what you believe.

If we even tolerate any oppression of gay and lesbian Americans, if we join those who would intrude upon the choices of our hearts, then who among us shall be free?

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name

I do believe that the analogy for bisexuality is a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view. Bisexuality follows from such a perspective and leads to it, as well.

suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you - who you really are - do survive.

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 so-called leaders.

The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender, and concealment these are not virtues. The goal of the mannerly is comfort, per se.

My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair

We survive our love because we go on loving.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

Sometimes we become so sophisticated we have to read the New York Times in order to figure out whether it's a hot or a rainy day.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

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.