You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.
AMANDA GORMANWhen you’re someone who’s lived a life where certain resources were scarce, you always feel like abundance is forbidden fruit.
More Amanda Gorman Quotes
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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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I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley.
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Through poetry we shall catch the conscience of a nation.
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Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.
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We know. We believe. And we act, because it is our civic duty.
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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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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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It wasn’t until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.
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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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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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When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.
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See the line where the sky meets the sea.
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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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But as for the future, I foresee a world which is more creative, more open, more loving, more ecologically friendly, more honest about its history and progress, and I think a lot of those contributions will be made by young people.
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Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
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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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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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I try to approach reading in front of millions of people as I would reading in somebody’s living room.
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Whenever I listen to songs, I rewrite them in my head.
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The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.
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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 am my own best mirror.
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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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As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.
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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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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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