Top 42 Lucille Clifton Quotes

#1. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #26647
#2. Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #81729
#3. Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #93653
#4. In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #95653
#5. dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #114447
#6. What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #191718
#7. We cannot create what we can't imagine.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #247515
#8. I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #253178
#9. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #254263
#10. Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #313793
#11. May you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #365117
#12. My Mama Moved Among the Days My Mama moved among the days like a dreamwalker in a field; seemed like what she touched was here seemed like what touched her couldn't hold, she got us almost through the high grass then seemed like she turned around and ran right back in right back on in

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #473932
#13. I keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #541374
#14. You cannot play for safety and make art.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #646993
#15. Say it clear, and it will be beautiful.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #649330
#16. I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #653846
#17. We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save us, something that will swirl across the face of what we have become and bring us grace.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #680393
#18. Tell the truth ... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #728747
#19. Was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #788951
#20. And at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #821950
#21. You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #877388
#22. Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #899963
#23. I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #902562
#24. I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people's craziness has not managed to make me crazy.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #953008
#25. 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

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #957581
#26. They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1015772
#27. All people, even one's own children, come with baggage. When they're little, you have to help them carry it. But when they grow up, you have to do that difficult thing of setting their baggage down and taking up your own again.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1021032
#28. Who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1068525
#29. 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.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1100073
#30. Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1104036
#31. I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1207834
#32. so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1312314
#33. 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.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1403300
#34. walked erect out of my sleep

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1479516
#35. Don't write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1480141
#36. These hips have never been enslaved, they go where they want to go they do what they want to do. these hips are mighty hips. these hips are magic hips

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1538569
#37. Telling the truth about children's lives is radical.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1576901
#38. I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1594912
#39. Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1624276
#40. The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1664831
#41. They will empty your eyes of everything you love

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1711068
#42. The literature of America should reflect the children of America.

Lucille Clifton

Lucille Clifton Quotes #1872111

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