Lucille Clifton Quotes & Sayings

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

Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure. — Lucille Clifton

Say it clear, and it will be beautiful. — Lucille Clifton

May you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back — Lucille Clifton

The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby. — Lucille Clifton

Telling the truth about children's lives is radical. — Lucille Clifton

I don't go get a poem. It calls me and I accept it. — Lucille Clifton

We cannot create what we can't imagine. — Lucille Clifton

They ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine — Lucille Clifton

Who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud? — Lucille Clifton

Was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia. — Lucille Clifton

Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed. — Lucille Clifton

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else. — Lucille Clifton

I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. — Lucille Clifton

Oh antic God
return to me
my mother in her thirties
leaned across the front porch
the huge pillow of her breasts
pressing against the rail
summoning me in for bed.
I am almost the dead woman's age times two.
I can barely recall her song
the scent of her hands
though her wild hair scratches my dreams
at night. return to me, oh Lord of then
and now, my mother's calling,
her young voice humming my name. — Lucille Clifton

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. — Lucille Clifton

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one. — Lucille Clifton

You might as well answer the door, my child,
the truth is furiously knocking. — Lucille Clifton

And at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me. — Lucille Clifton

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing. — Lucille Clifton

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. — Lucille Clifton

Listen,
you a wonder.
you a city of a woman.
you got a geography
of your own.
listen,
somebody need a map
to understand you.
somebody need directions
to move around you.
listen,
woman,
you not a noplace
anonymous
girl;
mister with his hands on you
he got his hands on
some
damn
body! — Lucille Clifton

Tell the truth ... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible. — Lucille Clifton

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense — Lucille Clifton

I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people's craziness has not managed to make me crazy. — Lucille Clifton

I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me. — Lucille Clifton

They will empty your eyes of everything you love — Lucille Clifton

My Mama Moved Among the Days My Mama moved among the days like a dreamwalker in a field; seemed like what she touched was here seemed like what touched her couldn't hold, she got us almost through the high grass then seemed like she turned around and ran right back in right back on in — Lucille Clifton

The lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names? — Lucille Clifton

I keep hearing tree talk water words and i keep knowing what they mean. — Lucille Clifton

Blessing the boats
(at saint mary's)
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back
may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that — Lucille Clifton

The lesson of the falling leaves
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves — Lucille Clifton

If i should enter the house and speak with my own voice, at last, about its awful furnitutre, pulling apart the covering over the dusty bodies; the randy father, the husband holding ice in his hand like a blessing, the mother bleeding into herself and the small imploding girl, i say if i should walk into that web, who will come flying after me, leaping tall buildings? you? — Lucille Clifton

walked erect out of my sleep — Lucille Clifton

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer. — Lucille Clifton

We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save us, something that will swirl across the face of what we have become and bring us grace. — Lucille Clifton

You cannot play for safety and make art. — Lucille Clifton

The literature of America should reflect the children of America. — Lucille Clifton

Even when the universe made it quite clear to me that I was mistaken in my certainties ... I did not break. The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me. — Lucille Clifton

Wishes for sons by Lucille Clifton i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. I wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late. later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to. let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves. — Lucille Clifton

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired. — Lucille Clifton

You are the one
I am lit for.
Come with your rod
that twists
and is a serpent.
I am the bush.
I am burning
I am not consumed. — Lucille Clifton

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of pictures and words just kept. — Lucille Clifton

I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn't come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ahhh." That was the first poem. — Lucille Clifton

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. — Lucille Clifton

Don't write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions. — Lucille Clifton

dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me. — Lucille Clifton

so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world — Lucille Clifton

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. — Lucille Clifton