June Jordan QUOTES

1 " We are the ones we've been waiting for. "

2 " and if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

(from i must become a menace to my enemies) "

― June Jordan , Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

3 " 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 depends upon self-love and self-respect. "

― June Jordan

4 " 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 need to honor with our own. "

― June Jordan

5 " ... momma
help me
turn the face of history
to your face.
- Getting Down To Get Over - Dedicated To My Mother "

― June Jordan , Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

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

― June Jordan

7 " Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth. "

― June Jordan

8 " I have been the meaning of rape
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent "

― June Jordan , Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems

9 " When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives "

― June Jordan ,

10 " And I am not pleased
I am not very pleased
None of this fits into my notion of “things going very well "

― June Jordan

11 " I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life "

― June Jordan , Poema sobre mis derechos

12 " 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. "

― June Jordan

13 " If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable. "

― June Jordan

14 " I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me "

― June Jordan

15 " I am the history of the rejection of who I am "

― June Jordan

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

― June Jordan , Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

17 " If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever coffee is available, but you cannot follow your heart-you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world-then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess?
Or, conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force? "

― June Jordan , Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

18 " To begin is no more agony than opening your hand. "

― June Jordan

19 " My heart is not peripheral to me. "

― June Jordan

20 " 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. "

― June Jordan

1
2
3