What a day. What a life. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you
AMANDA GORMANThe fight isn’t over – it’s just begun. It’s time to suit up for a battle that might determine the war.
More Amanda Gorman Quotes
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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.
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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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Through poetry we shall catch the conscience of a nation.
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Truth is to act out of the best of ourselves.
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My mom wanted to make sure I was prepared to grow up with Black skin in America.
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Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it’s this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.
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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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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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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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My Instagram doesn’t cover my insecurities, my lack of self-confidence, that week I spent crying, there’s a question of whether I should be sharing that online.
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One of my delays was in speech and speech pronunciation, and also the auditory processing issue just means I really struggle as an auditory learner.
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Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.
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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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I close my eyes and I am with this army of young women standing in a line and I imagine us walking forward together.
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Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.
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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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It was so incredible meeting Lady Gaga. I mean I’m gaga for Gaga, literally. We kind of just each flew to each other like magnets after the ceremony ended and we were both just crying and hugging.
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Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.
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To hone my voice, I read everything, from books to cereal boxes, three times: once for fun, the second time to learn something new about the writing craft, and the third time was to improve that piece.
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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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Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.
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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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I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch.
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When they tell you to go back to where you come from, tell them proudly that this is where you come from.
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I try to approach reading in front of millions of people as I would reading in somebody’s living room.
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We know. We believe. And we act, because it is our civic duty.
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