Joy Harjo Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.

Joy Harjo

I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies

Joy Harjo

When you were born I held you wet and unfolding, like a butterfly newly born from the chrysalis of my body.

Joy Harjo

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

Joy Harjo

All poets
understand the final uselessness of words. We are chords to
other chords to other chords, if we're lucky, to melody.

Joy Harjo

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone...She is all the women of the apartment building who stand watching her, watching themselves.

Joy Harjo

And knew he was one of the ones who yearned
for something his heart wasn't big enough
to handle.

Joy Harjo

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo

Creative Commons

Born: May 9, 1951 (age 73)

Bio: Joy Harjo is a Mvskoke poet, musician, and author. She is often cited as playing a formidable role in the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln termed the Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century.

Known for:

Crazy Brave: A Memoir (2012)
She had some horses (1983)
How we became human (2002)
In mad love and war (1990)
Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems (2015)

Joy Harjo on Wikipedia

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