Santiago Baca Quotes & Sayings

Professed authors who overestimate their vocation are too full of themselves to be agreeable companions. The demands of their egotism are inveterate. — Henry Theodore Tuckerman

I wanted it to provide an escape route, I wanted to make pictures that were fantastic and took you into another world, one that was brighter. I started off with this idea. — David LaChapelle

And so I pray I am today as honest
with myself, with life all around me and below and above me,
with all who I encounter. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Understanding is the key to everything. To rage, fear, love. If you understand a situation, it's going to make you mad. Or it's going to make you feel fearful. If any of us even had a clue as to what Bush and those people were up to, we'd be running stark crazy mad out of fear. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I sat back in my wooden chair as they signed the paperwork and stared down at the arm rests, studying the various layers of paint, the chips and cracks. How many hands had gripped them? I wondered. What lives were attached to those hands, what dreams were shattered, what sorrows were they trying to squeeze out of their souls? — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Make this day a tree
leaning over the river eternity
and fuss about in its branches. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

How much truth can we bear? Our tolerance for carrying the truth is not very high. I mean, the slightest discomfort about truth and we run to our refuge of our jobs and our schools and our friends who keep supporting our blindness. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Americans would have a right to go to war with the Iraqis if we could name one author from Iraq. It disturbs me that we're going to war with somebody we know absolutely nothing about. Name one Iraqi poet, one Iraqi woman activist, one Iraqi singer. Name one Iraqi novelist. You can't. And how can you go kill someone you don't know anything about? — Jimmy Santiago Baca

We're all self-destructive when we're young. We all rebel. If we don't, there's something wrong. But when a Chicano kid's in a rebellious state, he has nowhere to go but to put himself in jeopardy with the police. When a kid who has some class privilege rebels, he's in a beautiful room and he can buy these horrible CDs and drugs. He's buffered from being a criminal. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I would like to invite you to savour every moment of this experiential journey. Feel the energies of the earth, listen to them calling on the wind, whispering their secrets and beckoning you to explore their mysteries. — Carole Carlton

People say what distinguishes us from the animals is that we think. Well, then why the hell don't we extend some compassion to those under tremendous duress? There's this whole idea that you work really hard so you can deaden your soul to the universe and enjoy yourself only in ways the Sierra Club will let you. But what about enjoying yourself by getting into the whole melee of poverty and racism and violence and murder and drug addiction? Get in there, roll up your sleeves, and do something! Nobody does it. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Memory, imagination, and passionately responding in accord with the deeply embedded impulse to act with decency are pliable mechanisms that we can employ to attain happiness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I love the hip-hop nation. — Pam Grier

Christ comes, and his very coming demonstrates that God's favor rests on us, and that peace, peace, peace is available to us all. Shalom. Everything we need to live whole lives, to live wholly, to live holy. — Jane Rubietta

Grandmother was always regretting the old days-she was younger in old days,and the sun was warmer in old days,and cream did not turn so sour in old days-it was always the old days! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

We are all blind thinking that life consists of possessing material goods, holding onto this, then that, getting to know one thing, then another, then trying desperately to ignore the fact that the whole process inevitably amounts to absolutely nothing. Life isn't a game where you have to possess and know as many things as possible. Rather, it is about reducing yourself to zero, living in a new and more authentic way. — Jean Sulivan

I am learning to look at myself differently, to see the scattered remnants of hope and dreams and collect them again. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

The whole thing is this: If you don't use just basic grammar, if you don't get the language down, you're not going to have access to a tool that people use as a weapon against you. The only reason I was never taught to read and write was because it was easier for them to lead me. But the second I learned to read and write, I began to lead myself. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I can't stand the comfort zone. So many people I know, their parents give them their homes, and they get married and have children, or whatever. That's it. They don't ever go beyond that. That's not what life is. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I believe it's our responsibility as citizens to get in there and not accept the constant failure of prisons to deal with racism, lack of privilege, and impoverishment - not accept any of that. Just get in there! — Jimmy Santiago Baca

There's a theory in gameplay, particularly in first person shooters, that sometimes you don't want to have that much of a character because then it destroys the experience of the player being that character. — David S.Goyer

Anyhow, all mankind's ideas and interests, all human aims and motives, are exhibited, fully formed, in a three-year-old child. The kid is just operating on a smaller scale and lacks the advantage of having made enormous soft-money campaign contributions to political candidates. — P. J. O'Rourke

Literacy is freedom, and everyone has something significant to say, — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Being a human being without forgiveness is like being a guitarist without fingers or being the diva without a tongue. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

And I always have this feeling,
which may not be true at all,
that I am being used as a messenger.
I think I'm receiving,
and so,
I think I'm retransmitting! — Jose N. Harris

Competing helps me to polish my shape. — Blanka Vlasic

I emerged from the black oil pools in the forgotten house of dreams in the wild backcountry of the heart. I am heir to the sun, child of Mother Earth and the Mayan galaxy. All the mountain cures and healing waters and winds and junipers run deep in my bloodstream. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

You've got to invite Native Americans to the table, and Asians, and Chicanos. You cannot keep us in the back room anymore and give us notations on paper saying this is what you deserve. You have to invite us to the table because America is ours, too. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I do know that if you can name certain things and understand them, it allows you to make better choices. Unfortunately, there's so much misinformation that towers over a person's head, it's really difficult to make the right decisions. Consequently, we just go along because it's way too hard to sift through the information. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

It's the process of making-do,
of the life I've lived between
breakdowns and break-ups, that has made life
worth living.
I could not bear a life
with everything perfect. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

I am a face in a trance, evoking duende. My face imbues breath and stuns you with star-spirit. I am grove-face, story-teller face, and dawn-bringer face. A face as common as carrots and celery, called upon as a father to be cook, waiter, servant, and maid. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

One thing America truly does stand for is a million different ways of living. But while we enjoy the lives we have, we're so privileged. We live in a world that's so far from what the Palestinian children are going through, it's unbelievable. Yet if we dare to get close to that atrocity and name it, it would shock us so badly we couldn't live in our privileged comfort zone. — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Good God! how should the mitral valves prevent the regurgitation of air and not of blood? — William Harvey