Quotessence
Home / Authors / Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllPoetryPoemAmericaChangeThe Hill We ClimbUsaAnother NauticalLoveSocial JusticeUnited States

Famous Amanda Gorman Quotes

“At the age of 18 I know my color is not warning, but a welcome. A girl of color is a lighthouse, an ultraviolet ray of power, potential, and promise My color does not mean caution, it means courage my dark does not mean danger, it means daring, my brown does not mean broken, it means bold backbone from working twice as hard to get half as far. Being a girl of color means I am key, path, and wonder all in one body.”

PoetryPowerCouragePoemGirlsBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksAfrican American Women
Author:Amanda Gorman
Create image

“Non-being, i.e., distance from society—social distance—is the very heritage of the oppressed. Which means to the oppressor, social distance is a humiliation. It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white. For what does the Karen carry but her dwindling power, dying & desperate? Dangerous & dangling like a gun hung from a tongue?”

PoetrySocietyPoemOppressionMarginalizedMarginalized PeopleKarensOppressed People
Book:Call Us What We Carry
Create image

“During COVID, we've all been kept out of things. Gorman's poem eloquently lists many of the things we've been kept out of. Then she wrote - "Kept out of, kept in, kept from, kept behind, kept below, kept down. Kept without life. Some were asked to walk a fraction of our exclusion for a year and it almost destroyed all they thought they were. Yet here we are. Still Walking. Still kept. To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.”

ExcludedMarginalizedKept
Book:Call Us What We Carry
Create image

“The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.”

CensorshipFluMisinformation
Book:Call Us What We Carry
Create image

“Sometimes the extract is not an erasure, But an expansion. It is not a cut, but a culmination. Not a gash, but a growth. Life has taken the suffix -ship, made it a verb, Taken a sound & given it momentum. That's what only words can do -- Prod us toward something new & in doing so, move us closer -> together Perhaps our relationships are the very make of us, For fellowship is both our nature & our necessity. We are formed primarily by what we imagine.”

LifeGrowthRelationshipsImaginationMovementCreationFellowshipMomentumAnother Nautical
Book:Call Us What We Carry
Create image