Santiago Baca Quotes

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

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#2. The biggest changes in a women's nature are brought by love; in man, by ambition

Rabindranath Tagore

#3. 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

#4. Even though I didn't think I'd like empathy it kind of creeps up on you and makes you feel all warm and glowy inside. I don't think I want to go back to life without empathy.

Kathryn Erskine

#5. 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

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

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#7. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

Carl Sandburg

#8. Mr. Breschnev says we will bury you, I don't subscribe to that point of view. It seems like such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children, too.

Sting

#9. 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

#10. In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely, and then act boldly. Action brings with it its own courage, its own energy, a growth of self-confidence that can be acquired in no other way

Eleanor Roosevelt

#11. My work expresses an infatuation with human beings. I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

Rebecca West

#12. 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

#13. He was the first important person in my life to die, and when he did, it was the first time I realized that life is not fair or safe or even ours to own. I miss him.

Amy Poehler

#14. I've never actually participated in role-playing games myself, except on one occasion when a coworker of mine came to my house and introduced my two brothers and me to a single game of 'Dungeons & Dragons.'

Jeffrey Thomas

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

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. To take a side against Rushdie, or to be neutral and evasive about him in the name of some vaguely sensitive ecumenical conscience, is to stand against those who try to incubate a Reformation in the Muslim world.

Christopher Hitchens

#20. My mother was a great bringer-up of children. My memories are of a sense of security and comfort.

Graham Swift

#21. 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

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

Jimmy Santiago Baca

#23. 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

#24. 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