How Poetry Saved My Life Quotes

“Lying is the work of people who are told their truths have no value.
The labour of survival is laden with myth and misunderstanding.
Silence is the work of people who can't comprehend that change is possible.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“and I loved long drives
how you can close your eyes,

then open, and everything around you has changed.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“No, you don't write about love for the very same reason you refuse to learn to roller skate. You dislike the idea of introducing anything that requires hurting yourself repeatedly before you get good at it.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“Silence is the work of people who can't comprehend that change is possible.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“What would Samuel Becket say if he knew that Broadway musicals are all that survived of the theatre world?”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“When this paragraph ends, this story is all yours.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“I...believe that passively reading about or otherwise witnessing injustice injures us--it widens the disconnect. The part of us that is hurting does not heal in the dark; we must turn on the light to look at it. We must pay attention.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“Is desecration teaching?
Is violence knowledge? Is haunting
a kind of life? I had no model
for rebirth. No second coming blueprint.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“...I learned the power of identity--the idea that even an uneducated woman, like myself, who hadn't read Mary Wollstonecraft or bell hooks, could be an expert on feminism simply because of her identity as a woman.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir

“He has always been a silent gargoyle sitting at the head of our family table. I've pieced together his story from what little my relatives have shared in hushed disclosures and from reading other soldiers' biographies, visiting museums, and watching the documentary channel. I've adopted historic facts collected by experts and academics as my heritage. I've learned about my grandfather the way many of us (Generation Xers) learn about their elders, whose voices have been muted by dissociation, depression, alcoholism, trauma, and denial.”
― Amber Dawn, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler's Memoir