Lucille Clifton Quotes
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blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
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I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.
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In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.
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Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
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Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense
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I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it.
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Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.
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I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.
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I keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean.
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All people, even one's own children, come with baggage. When they're little, you have to help them carry it. But when they grow up, you have to do that difficult thing of setting their baggage down and taking up your own again.
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telling the truth about children's lives is radical.
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The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.
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the lesson of the falling leaves the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves
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To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
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Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.
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What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
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We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save us, something that will swirl across the face of what we have become and bring us grace.
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they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine
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Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.
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Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.
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You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.
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If i should enter the house and speak with my own voice, at last, about its awful furnitutre, pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies; the randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl, i say if i should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings? you?
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won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.
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I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.