Moraga Quotes & Sayings

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere. — Cherrie Moraga

In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people. — Cherrie Moraga

Smell remembers and tells the future ... Smell is home or loneliness. Confidence or betrayal. Smell remembers. — Cherrie Moraga

The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth — Cherrie Moraga

But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity. — Cherrie Moraga

Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation. — Cherrie Moraga

We are challenging white feminists to be accountable for their racism because at the base we still want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us. — Cherrie L. Moraga

When you are not physically starving, you have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation. — Cherrie Moraga

I am what I am and you can't take it away with all the words and sneers at your command. — Cherrie L. Moraga

Moraga's expedition of 1806 added further to the nomenclature of the Sierra. After crossing the San Joaquin his party came to a place which his men called Las Mariposas because of the swarms of butterflies (mariposas) which flew into their eyes and ears. — Francis P. Farquhar

To assess the damage is a dangerous act. — Cherrie Moraga

Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings. — Cherrie L. Moraga

I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently. — Cherrie Moraga

The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives. — Cherrie Moraga

Third World feminism is about feeding people in all their hungers. — Cherrie Moraga

The revolution begins at home. — Cherrie Moraga

We have let rhetoric do the job of poetry. — Cherrie Moraga

I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life. — Cherrie Moraga

The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to 'see', what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body - that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being - this is the revolutionary promise of "theory in the flesh — Cherrie L. Moraga

The passage is through, not over, not by, not around but through. — Cherrie Moraga

Our strategy is how we cope
how we measure and weigh what is to be said and when, what is to be done and how, and to whom and towhom and to whom, daily deciding/risking who it is we can call an ally, call a friend (whatever that person's skin, sex or sexuality). We are women without a line. We are women who contradict each other. — Cherrie Moraga

Hard work can't be ignored forever. — John Moraga

Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead. — Cherrie Moraga

Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage.
Naomi Littlebear — Cherrie L. Moraga

Spirituality which inspires activism and, similarly, politics which move the spirit - which draw from the deep-seated place of our greatest longings for freedom - give meaning to our lives. — Cherrie Moraga

Remember you live in a community. You have a responsibility to be accountable to your family and your community as well as yourself. — Cherrie Moraga

It's the Poverty.

I lack imagination you say

No. I lack language.
The language to clarify
my resistance to the literate.
Words are a war to me.
They threaten my family.

To gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
I may create a monster
the word's length and body
swelling up colorful and thrilling
looming over my mother, characterized.
Her voice in the distance
unintelligible illiterate.
These are the monster's words. — Cherrie L. Moraga

When entering a room full of soldiers who fear hearts
you put your heart in your back pocket. — Cherrie L. Moraga