Quotessence
Home / Authors / June Jordan
June Jordan

June Jordan Quotes

Poet

Filter quotes by topic

AllIfsBlackWhiteChildrenMeanAmericaLanguagePoetryStatesTelling The TruthHeartNamesPeoplePoliticalThinkingWayBodyMenPoemPoet

Famous June Jordan Quotes

“What kind of a person could kill a Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and stay above suspicion? What about the police? What about somebody Black? What sixteen year old would say no to a cop? What seven year old would say no thanks to me? What is an overreaction to murder? What kind of a person could kill a Black child and then kill a Black child and then kill a Black child? What kind of a person are you? What kind of a person am I? What makes you so sure? What kind of a person could save a Black child? What kind of a people will lay down its life for the lives of our children? What kind of a people are we?”

ChildrenDeathPoetryPoemMurderAfrican AmericansBlacks
Author:June Jordan
Create image

“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”

MayChildrenMoralTaughtTruth IsAdultsPainfulTelling The TruthSensationsI Have LearnedMoral Life
Book:Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
Create image

“When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives”

TryingChildrenMadeDifferentGirlBoysHeardFlowerAdultsDecidedOur ChildrenSeekingCompromiseHatedRejectionFrightenedLaughedMistakenHollowHippieHideousBoy And GirlHippi
Author:June Jordan
Create image

“To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.”

LoveMayChildrenLittlesChoicesDifferencesHurtForeverOur ChildrenVulnerableRescueFear Of Death
Author:June Jordan
Create image

“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”

ThinkingWayGivingChildrenSpiritChoicesUniverseNamesHabitOur ChildrenMiseryMotherhoodTricksMannersSpiteGood ManFatherhoodNew LifeWrecksResemblanceGood MannersBribeWholesaleEmulation
Author:June Jordan
Create image