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Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo Quotes

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Famous Joy Harjo Quotes

“But you must have grown out of a thousand years dreaming just like I could never imagine you. You must have broke open from another sky to here, because now I see you as a part of the millions of other universes that I thought could never occur in this breathing. And I know you as myself, traveling. In your eyes alone are many colonies of stars and other circling planet motion.”

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“The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.”

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“Vision The rainbow touched down 'somewhere in the Rio Grande,' we said. And saw the light of it from your mother's house in Isleta. How it curved down between earth and the deepest sky to give us horses of color horses that were within us all of this time but we didn't see them because we wait for the easiest vision to save us. In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky. I heard the thunder of their beating hearts. Their lungs hit air and sang. All the colors of horses formed the rainbow, and formed us watching them.”

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“Moonlight I know when the sun is in China because the night shining other-light crawls into my bed. She is moon. Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque— Fourth Street, or from similar avenues in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also awakened, the night thrown back and asked, 'where is the moon, my lover'? And from here I always answer in my dreaming, 'the last time I saw her was in the arms of another sky'.”

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“What I Should Have Said There's nothing that says you can't call. I spend the weekdays teaching and moving my children from breakfast to bedtime. What else, I feel like a traitor telling someone else things I can't tell to you. What is it that keeps us together? Fingertip to fingertip, from Santa Fe to Albuquerque? I feel bloated with what I should say and what I don't. We drift and drift, with few storms of heat inbetween the motions. I love you. The words confuse me. Maybe they have become a cushion keeping us in azure sky and in flight not there, not here. We are horses knocked out with tranquilizers sucked into a deep deep sleeping for the comfort and anesthesia death. We are caught between clouds and wet earth and there is no motion either way no life to speak of.”

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“In my family Monahwee is known for his magic with horses. My Aunt Lois Harjo said he was gifted in the ability to travel on a horse. He could leave for a destination at the same time as everyone else, but arrive before anyone, a feat impossible in linear time. The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind. When the explorer Magellan traveled around the world by ship, he stopped at Tierra del Fuego. The indigenous people who resided there could not see the huge flags of his ships as they docked out in the natural harbor. They had not previously imagined such structures and could not see them. Conversely, neither could European explorers see the particular meaning of indigenous realities.”

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