Oscar > Oscar's Quotes

“Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.
If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.
If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
And that’s who forms our poetics.”
― Juan Felipe Herrera

“This is the city, and I am one of the citizens/Whatever interests the rest interests me”
― Walt Whitman

“The fact that I
am writing to you
in English
already falsifies what I
wanted to tell you.
My subject:
how to explain to you
that I don't belong to English
though I belong nowhere else,
if not here
in English.”
― Gustavo Pérez Firmat

“Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps”
― Chuck D

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”
― William Carlos Williams

“Even the most political poem is an act of faith.”
― Martin Espada

“This is definitely / for the brothers / who ain't here.”
― Willie Perdomo, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime

“Your war drum ain't / louder than this breath.”
― Suheir Hammad, Zaatar Diva

“You shall create beauty not to excite the senses
but to give sustenance to the soul. ”
― Gabriela Mistral

“Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción”
― Julia de Burgos, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”
― Audre Lorde

“Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”
― Derek Walcott

“Only the phoenix rises and does not descend. And everything changes. And nothing is truly lost.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 10: The Wake

“Streets paved with opal sadness,
Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,
And jazz.”
― Bob Kaufman, Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems

“Migration is the story of my body”
― Victor Hernández Cruz

“While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“Yo, poeta de oficio, condenada tantas veces”
― Claribel Alegría

“Sometimes when I see a bad performance and people still clap... I wonder if they're clapping because they liked what they saw or because they're happy it's over?”
― Kanye West, Thank You and You're Welcome

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes
which has no speech”
― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality
but a hammer with which to shape it.”
― Bertolt Brecht

“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.”
― Eduardo Galeano

“Si le niegan la boca, ella habla por las manos, o por los ojos, o por los poros, o por donde sea.

Porque todos, toditos tenemos algo que decir a los demas; alguna cosa que merece ser por los demas celebrada, o perdonada.”
― Eduardo Hughes Galeano