Top 42 Lucille Clifton Quotes
#1. To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.
Lucille Clifton
#2. Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.
Lucille Clifton
#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
#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
#6. What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
Lucille Clifton
#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
#9. Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
Lucille Clifton
#10. Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense
Lucille Clifton
#11. May you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
Lucille Clifton
#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
#13. I keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean.
Lucille Clifton
#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
#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
#18. Tell the truth ... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.
Lucille Clifton
#19. Was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.
Lucille Clifton
#20. And at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.
Lucille Clifton
#21. You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking.
Lucille Clifton
#22. Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton
#23. I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
Lucille Clifton
#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
#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
#26. They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine
Lucille Clifton
#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
#28. Who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?
Lucille Clifton
#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
#32. so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world
Lucille Clifton
#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
#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
#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
#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
#40. The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.
Lucille Clifton
#42. The literature of America should reflect the children of America.
Lucille Clifton
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