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Lucille Clifton
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“The end of a thing, / is never the end, / something is always being born like / a year or a baby.”
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“we have always loved each other / children all ways / pass it on.”
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“... in the days where daddy was / there is a space.”
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“i keep knowing / the language of other nations. / i keep hearing / tree talk / water words / and i keep knowing what they mean.”
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“i had expected more than this. / i had not expected to be / an ordinary woman.”
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“Turning into my own / turning on into my own self at last.”
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“'Oh, slavery, slavery,' my Daddy would say. 'It ain't something in a book, Lue. Even the good parts was awful.'”
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“... my life as a human only includes my life as a poet, it doesn't depend on it.”
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“I have always known that being very poor, which we were, had nothing to do with lovingness or familyness, or character or any of that ... We were quite clear that what we didn't have didn't have anything to do with what we were.”
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“they ask me to remember / but they want me to remember / their memories / and I keep on remembering / mine.”
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“People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.”
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“I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it.”
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“Intellect doesn't translate across cultures; intuition does.”
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“One of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn was that I couldn't protect my children from their own lives.”
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“ All people, even one's own children, come with baggage. When they're little, you have to help them carry it. But when they grow up, you have to do that difficult thing of setting their baggage down and taking up your own again.”
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“You cannot play for safety and make art.”
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“... telling the truth about children's lives is radical.”
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“In the bigger scheme of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that's a whole different thing.”
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“these hips are big hips / ... / they don't like to be held back. / these hips have never been enslaved, / they go where they want to go / they do what they want to do. / these hips are mighty hips. / these hips are magic hips.”
Lucille Clifton, U.S. poet, children's writer
(1938 - 2009)
Full name: Lucille Sayles Clifton.