June Jordan

Writer

1936-07-09

Quotes by June Jordan

• I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

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• and if iif i ever let love gobecause the hatred and the whisperingsbecome a phantom dictate i o-bey in lieu of impulse and realities(the blossoming flamingos of mywild mimosa trees)then let love freeze meout.(from i must become a menace to my enemies)

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• I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

  Read quote

• and if iif i ever let love gobecause the hatred and the whisperingsbecome a phantom dictate i o-bey in lieu of impulse and realities(the blossoming flamingos of mywild mimosa trees)then let love freeze meout.(from i must become a menace to my enemies)

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• In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.

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• Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

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• I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

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• My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

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• My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.

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• Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

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• To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

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• We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.

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