That’s kind of the challenging thing about writing an inaugural poem. You’re speaking to everyone, but you don’t also want to speak for everyone.
AMANDA GORMANI was born early, along with my twin, and a lot of times, for infants, that can lead to learning delays.
More Amanda Gorman Quotes
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I think we run into issues when our online brands are not rooted in who we are, and I think we need to have explicit discussions with ourselves about who we want to be, what we want to represent, and how we want to express that.
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See the line where the sky meets the sea.
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What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.
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We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice.
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I grew up at this incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black ‘hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands.
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I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.
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What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.
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I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.
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Writing wasn’t just a form of expression. It was a form of pathology by embarking on spoken word over and over and over again and reciting my poems.
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When you’re someone who’s lived a life where certain resources were scarce, you always feel like abundance is forbidden fruit.
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Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.
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Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.
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When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.
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I was writing since I can remember – I just didn’t know it was poetry yet, or that writing could be a career.
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Truth is to act out of the best of ourselves.
AMANDA GORMAN







