25 Noteworthy Quotes By Lucille Clifton
Lucile Clifton was an American poet and educator, famous for her works ‘My Black Me: A Beginning Book of Black Poetry’, ‘A Poem of Her Own: Voices of American Women Yesterday and Today’ and ‘Black Stars: African American Women Writers’. She worked as the poet laureate of Maryland for more than 6 years, and nominated twice for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Her main theme of writing was loosely based on the struggles and injustice faced by the African-American female community in the midst of Slavery in the United States. Clifton’s endless list of accolades includes Shelley Memorial Award, National Book Award for Poetry, the Charity Randall prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, and an Emmy Award. This writer also received grants and fellowships from esteemed institutions such as National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets. We have compiled her notable quotes and thoughts from her writings, articles, speeches etc. Here are some inspiring quotes and lines from this American icon.
You might as well answer the door, my child, the truth is furiously knocking.
May you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back
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
Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.
They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine
What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
We cannot create what we can't imagine.
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?
They will empty your eyes of everything you love
I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.
A tongue blistered with smiling
I am rejuvenated bones rising from the dear floor where they found you
Dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.
So many languages have fallen off the edge of the world
They are shrouding words so that families cannot find them.
Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Walked erect out of my sleep
Her dangling braids the color of rain.
And at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.
Was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.
You are the one I am lit for. Come with your rod that twists and is a serpent. I am the bush. I am burning I am not consumed.
The literature of America should reflect the children of America.
