54 quotes
I say solidarity is knowing the future is long and wide, with room for everyone on earth to enter. I say it's taking the long view of the job. (from "Letter To a Compañero")
Getting Home Alive with Rosario Morales (1986)
I hope that future generations of women writers will have lives so much easier than mine that they will instantly perceive barbarities of my situation I don't see, because I can't imagine their absence.
Foreword to A Pan-American Life: Selected Poetry and Prose of Muna Lee (2004)
To live a lifetime of audacity, dwelling in the place where joy meets justice, year after year, can only be sustained by being so in love with a vision of what's possible that we no longer flirt with despair.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. ("Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
sediment has no nationality. Sediment drifts from place to place, on currents of water and air, on muskrat fur and the feathers of Indigo Buntings. It travels without passports, visas, or allegiances.
Preface to Silt: Prose Poems (2019)
I believe that we have it in us to rise to this moment, to end the failed experiment of greed, restore the streams of our creative power, and establish a global culture of reciprocity and generosity as the beating heart of human life on earth.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Torturers are made, not born. We know enough about the repetitive cycles of violence, enough about the training of secret police and death squads, special military units and spies to know that the way you learn to torture is by being tortured.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Earth-centered cultures everywhere held our kinship with land and animals and plants as core knowledge, central to living. The land had to be soaked with blood and that knowledge, those cultures shattered, before private ownership could be erected. It wasn't just theft.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
The relationship between mother and daughter stands in the center of what I fear most in our culture. Heal that wound and we change the world. A revolution capable of healing our wounds. If we're the ones who can imagine it, if we're the ones who dream about it, if we're the ones who need it most, then no one else can do it. We're the ones.
We who believe in freedom, whose daily lives are made up of the clash between what we want for this world and the violent greed that surrounds us, need a culture rich in our people's dreams to keep us sane.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
This tribe called "women of color" is not an ethnicity. It is one of the inventions of solidarity, an alliance, a political necessity that is not the given name of every female with dark skin and a colonized tongue, but rather a choice about how to resist and with whom.
European Americans in this country need to find out against whom their whiteness has been structured, both historically and in the present. ("Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Unnecessarily specialized language is used to humiliate those who are not supposed to feel entitled. It sells the illusion that only those who can wield it can think. ("Certified Organic Intellectual")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Not one of those books that ignore us could have been written without our shopping, baking, mending, ironing, typing, making coffee, comforting. Without our caring for the children, minding the store, getting in the crop, making their businesses pay. This is our story, and the truth of our lives will overthrow them.
Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriquenas (1997)