Appalachian Elegy Quotes

“Poetry is a useful place for lamentation...poems are a place where we can cry out.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“I have no fear here, in this world of trees, weeds, and growing things.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“sometimes falling rain
carries memories of betrayal
there in the woods
where she was not meant to be
too young she believes
in her right to be free
in her body
free from harm
believing nature
a wilderness she can enter
be solaced
believing the power
that there be sacred place
that there can be atonement now
she returns with no fear
facing the past
ready to risk
knowing these woods now
hold beauty and danger”
― Bell Hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things: that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility of being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“a deep smothering emptiness”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they knew how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wildness, in themselves or nature.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“making soil soup deep”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“all 'people of one blood' who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“threads of power and domination a palimpsest of greed”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Poems of lamentation allow the melancholic loss that never truly disappears to be given voice. Like a slow solemn musical refrain played again and again, they call us to remember and mourn, to know again that as we work for change our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“When poetry stirs in my imagination it is almost always from an indirect place, where language is abstract, where the mood and energy is evocative of submerged emotional intelligence and experience.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“the poems repeat sorrow sounds, connecting the pain of a historical Kentucky landscape ravaged by war and all human conditions that are like war.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“44.
fly high
dreaming bird
higher and higher
on the wire of time
no road blocks
no stopping
to think through
why wings flap
what makes
the worthy soar
only this
pure heaven
right now
sky high”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“here in this untouched wood
a dirge a lamentation
for earth to live again
earth that is all at once a grave
a resting place a bed of new beginning”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“they have the right to fall when life comes to an end to move in harmony with fate”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“spirits bring contentment for a time carry us closer to the sacred moving through bitterness our yearning to hold on to moments of ecstasy where we imagine we hear clearly destiny calling”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“time is aboriginal eternal”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“nature as chameleon”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“here I will give you thunder
shatter your hearts with rain”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“mud sliding down wet can do this make danger fall upon us turn the pure in heart away no water for holy cleansing no water for drying thirst just black death smothering earth soot after fire”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“there is hope that sorrow ends”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“here I will give you thunder shatter your hearts with rain let snow soothe you make your healing water clear sweet a sacred spring where the thirsty may drink animals all”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“pink and white oleander not native to Appalachian ground still here lies years and years of poison rebel flags heritage and hate in the war to fight hunger and ongoing loss there are no sides there is only the angry mind of hurt bringing death too soon destroying all our dreams of union”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“there was little attention paid to the black experience of folks living on the land. Just as the work of the amazing naturalist George Washington Carver is often forgotten when lists are made of great black men. We forget our rural black folks, black farmers, folks who long ago made their homes in the hills of Appalachia. All my people come from the hills, from the backwoods, even the ones who ran away from this heritage refusing to look back. No one wanted to talk about the black farmers who lost land to white supremacist violence. No one wanted to talk about the extent to which that racialized terrorism created a turning point in the lives of black folks wherein nature, once seen as a freeing place, became a fearful place. That silence has kept us from knowing the ecohistories of black folks. It has kept folk from claiming an identity and a heritage that is so often forgotten or erased.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“fierce unyielding winds
pressing pushing
against window glass
trees swaying
branches falling
chaos warning
of danger
she does not want
to cut them down
she does not want
to fear those mighty oaks
standing guard
for more years
than can be counted
strong roots sustaining life
holding back
the rush of time
let earth testify
they have the
right to fall
when life comes to an end
to move
in harmony with fate”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“15. pink and white oleander not native to Appalachian ground still here lies years and years of poison rebel flags heritage and hate in the war to fight hunger and ongoing loss there are no sides there is only the angry mind of hurt bringing death too soon destroying all our dreams of union”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“we have earth to bind us”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Ethics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing ‘wild’ side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both models and metaphors. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move towards a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place