Jimmy Santiago Baca Quotes

#1. Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#2. Understanding is the key to everything. To rage, fear, love. If you understand a situation, it's going to make you mad. Or it's going to make you feel fearful. If any of us even had a clue as to what Bush and those people were up to, we'd be running stark crazy mad out of fear.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#3. Being a human being without forgiveness is like being a guitarist without fingers or being the diva without a tongue.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#4. It's the process of making-do,
of the life I've lived between
breakdowns and break-ups, that has made life
worth living.
I could not bear a life
with everything perfect.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#5. How much truth can we bear? Our tolerance for carrying the truth is not very high. I mean, the slightest discomfort about truth and we run to our refuge of our jobs and our schools and our friends who keep supporting our blindness.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#6. I can't stand the comfort zone. So many people I know, their parents give them their homes, and they get married and have children, or whatever. That's it. They don't ever go beyond that. That's not what life is.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#7. I am a face in a trance, evoking duende. My face imbues breath and stuns you with star-spirit. I am grove-face, story-teller face, and dawn-bringer face. A face as common as carrots and celery, called upon as a father to be cook, waiter, servant, and maid.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#8. I am learning to look at myself differently, to see the scattered remnants of hope and dreams and collect them again.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#9. Make this day a tree
leaning over the river eternity
and fuss about in its branches.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#10. You've got to invite Native Americans to the table, and Asians, and Chicanos. You cannot keep us in the back room anymore and give us notations on paper saying this is what you deserve. You have to invite us to the table because America is ours, too.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#11. And so I pray I am today as honest
with myself, with life all around me and below and above me,
with all who I encounter.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#12. Literacy is freedom, and everyone has something significant to say,

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#13. I emerged from the black oil pools in the forgotten house of dreams in the wild backcountry of the heart. I am heir to the sun, child of Mother Earth and the Mayan galaxy. All the mountain cures and healing waters and winds and junipers run deep in my bloodstream.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#14. I believe it's our responsibility as citizens to get in there and not accept the constant failure of prisons to deal with racism, lack of privilege, and impoverishment - not accept any of that. Just get in there!

Jimmy Santiago Baca