Quotations by Author

June Jordan

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

This literature was completely incomprehensible to me, but I became immersed in the sounds of the language of these great writers.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.