Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician and author.
Joy Harjo work often explores the themes of nature, love, life and loss.
Best Joy Harjo Quotes
There is no poetry where there are no mistakes. ~ Joy Harjo.
Remember that you are all people and that all people are you. ~ Joy Harjo.
The songs of the guardians of silence are the most powerful. ~ Joy Harjo.
Be who you are, even if it kills you. It will. Over and over again. Even as you live. ~ Joy Harjo.
The heart is a fist. It pockets prayer or holds rage. ~ Joy Harjo.
My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering. ~ Joy Harjo.
I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won’t work. ~ Joy Harjo.
True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others. ~ Joy Harjo.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. ~ Joy Harjo.
I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day. ~ Joy Harjo.
Famous Joy Harjo Quotes
Poetry keeps the door open to awe and ensures that we will find our way through the broken heart field of wars, losses and betrayals to understanding, compassion and gathering together. ~ Joy Harjo.
I have more questions than answers in this world as do most poets and writers. The field of memory we exist in is absolutely encompassing and is both a question and answer. It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit. ~ Joy Harjo.
I have forgotten the reason, forgive me. I have forgotten my name in the language I was born to, forgive me. ~ Joy Harjo.
Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts. ~ Joy Harjo.
It’s important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever. ~ Joy Harjo.
Top Joy Harjo Quotes
I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn’t your real husband, he was a bad dream – an alien of sorts – who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in. ~ Joy Harjo.
I could hear my abandoned dreams making a racket in my soul. ~ Joy Harjo.
I lay my body down in another city, another hotel room. Once Louis Armstrong and his band stayed here. Later the hotel fell to trash. New money resurrected it. Under the red moon of justice, I dream with the king of jazz. ~ Joy Harjo.
Within a few generations we had gone from being nearly one hundred percent of the population of this continent to less than one-half of one percent. We were all haunted. ~ 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.
In the end, we must each tend to our own gulfs of sadness, though others can assist us with kindness, food, good words, and music. Our human tendency is to fill these holes with distractions like shopping and fast romance, or with drugs and alcohol. ~ Joy Harjo.
To the destroyers, Earth is not a person. They will want more until there is no more to steal. ~ Joy Harjo.
Popular Joy Harjo Quotes
Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands. ~ Joy Harjo.
European and American settlers soon took over the lands that were established for settlement of eastern tribes in what became known as Indian Territory. The Christian god gave them authority. Yet everyone wanted the same thing: land, peace, a place to make a home, cook, fall in love, make children and music. ~ Joy Harjo.
It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit. ~ Joy Harjo.
All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation and challenge – those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding. ~ Joy Harjo.
She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. This legacy either will give those who follow us joy on their road or will give them sorrow. ~ Joy Harjo.
Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. ~ Joy Harjo.
If we cry more tears we will ruin the land with salt; instead let’s praise that which would distract us with despair. Make a song for death, a song for yellow teeth and bad breath. ~ Joy Harjo.
Joy Harjo Quotes on Poetry
And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. ~ Joy Harjo.
I was born with eyes that can never close… ~ Joy Harjo.
Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning – We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love. ~ Joy Harjo.
I came into poetry feeling as though, on some level, these words were not just mine but my grandparents’, their parents’. ~ Joy Harjo.
Every collection of poetry makes a force field of energy. When creating you give yourself over to it. In the fiercest moments of imagination the artist may not know where they are going, the how and when of it, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the process regenerates and meaning shifts at every turn. ~ Joy Harjo.
All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice. ~ Joy Harjo.
She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. ~ Joy Harjo.
There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die. ~ Joy Harjo.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. ~ Joy Harjo.
Powerful Joy Harjo Quotes
Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm. ~ Joy Harjo.
I’ve always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies. ~ Joy Harjo.
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.
In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky. ~ Joy Harjo.
Nothing ever stays the same, whether it be poems or humans. ~ Joy Harjo.
I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn’t have at dusk. ~ Joy Harjo.
When the Sun leaves at dusk, it makes a doorway. We have access to ancestors, to eternity. Breathe out. Ask for forgiveness. Let all hurts and failures go. Let them go. ~ Joy Harjo.
So these were the 47 top quotes about Joy Harjo.
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