Quotes About Harjo

#1. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

Joy Harjo

#2. I walk in and out of several worlds every day.

Joy Harjo

#3. It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.

Joy Harjo

#4. I never fit in. Everyone knew my dad was Indian. I was half-Indian.

Joy Harjo

#5. Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts

Joy Harjo

#6. A story matrix connects all of us.
There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part.

Joy Harjo

#7. Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.

Joy Harjo

#8. You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you.

Joy Harjo

#9. It's possible to understand the world from studying a leaf. You can comprehend the laws of aerodynamics, mathematics, poetry and biology through the complex beauty of such a perfect structure.
It's also possible to travel the whole globe and learn nothing.

Joy Harjo

#10. I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.

Joy Harjo

#11. Most people don't know that Congo Square was originally a Muscogee ceremonial ground ... in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.

Joy Harjo

#12. Remember that you are this universe and that this universe is you.

Joy Harjo

#13. The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone ... She is all the women of the apartment building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

Joy Harjo

#14. The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Joy Harjo

#15. I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work.

Joy Harjo

#16. I don't see the desert as barren at all; I see it as full and ripe. It doesn't need to be flattered with rain. It certainly needs rain, but it does with what it has, and creates amazing beauty.

Joy Harjo

#17. Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.

Joy Harjo

#18. You're coming with me, poor thing. You don't know how to listen. You don't know how to speak. You don't know how to sing. I will teach you. I followed poetry.

Joy Harjo

#19. There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die.

Joy Harjo

#20. I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

Joy Harjo

#21. For most Native Americans, there's no more offensive name in English. That non-Native folks think they get to measure or decide what offends us is adding insult to injury.

Suzan Shown Harjo

#22. All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.

Joy Harjo

#23. The schools I went to as a kid made me wary. It was clear to me that everything was a lie except math.

Suzan Shown Harjo

#24. I come from a long line of revolutionaries.

Joy Harjo

#25. Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands

Joy Harjo

#26. I've been present at birth, and death is just as present and in equal balance. And I've been present at death, and birth is just as present, again in equal balance.

Joy Harjo

#27. I was born with eyes that can never close...

Joy Harjo

#28. It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.

Joy Harjo

#29. I've always loved the desert. I've spent most of my life in the Southwest. It's certainly influenced my work. I used to dream about it when I was young.

Joy Harjo

#30. But come here, Fear. / I am alive! / And you are so afraid / of dying.

Joy Harjo

#31. Remember that you are all people and that all people are you.

Joy Harjo

#32. It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit.

Joy Harjo

#33. I lay my body down in another city, another hotel room. Once Louis Armstrong and his band stayed here. Later the hotel fell to trash. New money resurrected it. Under the red moon of justice, I dream with the king of jazz.

Joy Harjo

#34. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy Harjo

#35. Alive. This music rocks
me. I drive the interstate,
watch faces come and go on either
side. I am free to be sung to;
I am free to sing. This woman
can cross any line.

Joy Harjo

#36. If we cry more tears we will ruin the land with salt; instead let's praise that which would distract us with despair. Make a song for death, a song for yellow teeth and bad breath

Joy Harjo

#37. My sister accommodates me, never reproaches me with her doctrine, never tries to change me. She accepts and loves me, despite our differences.

Joy Harjo

#38. The radio is playing jazz, and I listen to the sound of the trumpet playing a solo until I become that sound.

Joy Harjo

#39. My mother wrote lyrics and sang but was overtaken by life with four children and worked.

Joy Harjo

#40. Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning - We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love.

Joy Harjo

#41. My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering.

Joy Harjo

#42. I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day.

Joy Harjo

#43. Societies who do not care for their young people and old people are decadent, decaying societies.

Suzan Shown Harjo

#44. I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that everything has changed. It's so hot; there is not enough winter. Animals are confused. Ice is melting.

Joy Harjo

#45. I love the sound of the saxophone. It became my singing voice, and it sounds so human. The saxophone could carry the words past the border of words. It can carry it a little bit farther.

Joy Harjo

#46. 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.

Joy Harjo

#47. True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others.

Joy Harjo

#48. She had horses who were the blue air of the sky.

Joy Harjo

#49. My house is the red earth ...

Joy Harjo

#50. If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.

Joy Harjo

#51. I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other.

Joy Harjo

#52. I started writing to save my life.

Joy Harjo

#53. My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States.

Joy Harjo

#54. Sometimes, I think, in order to get to something that we really want or we really love or something that needs to be realized, that we're tested.

Joy Harjo

#55. I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies

Joy Harjo

#56. The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body; it affects the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective spirit.

Joy Harjo

#57. I don't like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We're human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.

Joy Harjo

#58. We're all given something to do. And when we don't follow what we're supposed to do, we always know when we're off track.

Joy Harjo

#59. I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

Joy Harjo

#60. She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams.

Joy Harjo

#61. When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers. They didn't understand that the sun is a relative and illuminates our path on this earth.

Joy Harjo

#62. I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hate twin, but now, I don't know you as myself

Joy Harjo

#63. There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.

Joy Harjo

#64. I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn't have at dusk.

Joy Harjo

#65. When you play a sax, that saxophone is irreverent. It's noisy; it's a trickster ... you cannot hide the saxophone in your hands, so it's a good teacher.

Joy Harjo

#66. Those of fire move about the earth with inspiration and purpose. They are creative, and can consume and be consumed by their desires [ ... ] My father-to-be was of the water and could not find a hold in the banks of earthiness. Water people can easily get lost.

Joy Harjo

#67. You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

Joy Harjo