Lucille Clifton Quotes
Quotes to Explore
-
When I was a little girl, I told everyone I was going to marry a very clever scientist and have ten children. I would always draw the children, and they included blond-haired twin boys whom I named Theodore and Frederick: Teddy and Freddy for short.
-
Military brats have this toughness: they're almost like orphans or foster children; they develop little mechanisms. It sets you up to look at things a little differently.
-
I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.
-
Country music is three chords and the truth.
-
I couldn't have children, so that's the bad side. But compared to everything else I have, it's not all that terribly bad. I count my winners rather than my losers.
-
What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.
-
Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
-
The problem with most children's hospitals is that they are passive. They are high quality. They are filled with the best doctors. But their function is to wait until kids get sick and get referred in.
-
I think that there's no doubt that as I see friends, families, children of gay couples who are thriving, you know, that has an impact on how I think about these issues.
-
Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children's writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.
-
I used to be more paranoid and stressed, constantly worrying about my Plan B. But the truth is I don't have one.
-
What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren't supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown - watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?
-
I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.
-
When I first visited the Hospice in Milton, I had a pre-conceived idea as to what to expect. Far from being a clinical, depressing place for sick children, it was a home. Most importantly, it was a family home, a happy place of stability, support and care. It was a place of fun.
-
Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.
-
I do have the most marvelous husband, children, and grandchildren.
-
By preventing pneumonia and other diseases, we are giving men, women and children the chance to live healthy productive lives and participate in the global economy. In doing so, we are not only enhancing their futures - we are enhancing our own.
-
We know that for children, hunger is especially devastating.
-
Yet truth will sometimes lend her noblest fires,And decorate the verse herself inspires:This fact, in virtue's name, let Crabbe attest,-Though Nature's sternest painter, yet the best.
-
People keep asking me when I'm going to start singing instead of speaking. I can't sing! I'm rubbish! Why don't they believe me?
-
It's man's work. My dad was gone at 4:30 in the morning and home at 8 at night, and he worked underground, and the last mine he worked in was 26 inches high in a lot of places. He liked the engineering of it - he liked the moving the earth and being able to extract something and put it back for reclamation. He enjoyed the whole process.
-
For so much of my life, I lived feeling as if, if I spoke, if I said something, I would lose everything. I would be pushed out. No one will want me. No one will love me. No one would want to be friends with me. It took me decades to get to a space of saying, 'This is my truth. This is who I am, and I don't care if you like me or you don't like me.'
-
telling the truth about children's lives is radical.
