June Jordan > Quotes

“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan

“I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan

“and if i
if i ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate i o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

(from i must become a menace to my enemies)”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems

“If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.”
― June Jordan

“Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan

“To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.”
― June Jordan

“When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives”
― June Jordan, Passion: New Poems, 1977 1980

“My heart is not peripheral to me.”
― June Jordan

“I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me”
― June Jordan

“And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.”
― June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

“It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again.

"But in general, our children have no voice--that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence.

"But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving.”
― June Jordan

“They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant”
― June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems