Top 25 Joy Harjo Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Joy Harjo Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body

The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body; it affects the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective spirit.
Joy Harjo
My mother wrote lyrics and sang but was overtaken by life with four children and worked.
Joy Harjo
I am a member of the Muskogee people. I’m a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I’m looking for answers of some sort or the other.
Joy Harjo
I started writing to save my life.
Joy Harjo
The radio is playing jazz, and I listen to the sound of the trumpet playing a solo until I become that sound.
Joy Harjo
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers. They didn’t understand that the sun is a relative and illuminates our path on this earth.
Joy Harjo
I hear from my Inuit and Yupik relatives up north that everything has changed. It’s so hot; there is not enough winter. Animals are confused. Ice is melting.
Joy Harjo
The creative act amazes me. Whether it’s poetry, whether it’s music, it’s an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.
Joy Harjo
I love the sound of the saxophone. It became my singing voice, and it sounds so human. The saxophone could carry the words past the border of words. It can carry it a little bit farther.
Joy Harjo
Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning.
Joy Harjo
It took me 14 years to write ‘Crazy Brave’ because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don’t really want to write about myself. But it’s about writing about memory.
Joy Harjo
We’re all given something to do. And when we don’t follow what we’re supposed to do, we always know when we’re off track.
Joy Harjo
I never fit in. Everyone knew my dad was Indian. I was half-Indian.
Joy Harjo
I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.
Joy Harjo
I don’t see the desert as barren at all; I see it as full and ripe. It doesn’t need to be flattered with rain. It certainly needs rain, but it does with what it has, and creates amazing beauty.
Joy Harjo
My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States.
Joy Harjo
You can’t look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don’t look for it. Don’t look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you.
Joy Harjo
Sometimes, I think, in order to get to something that we really want or we really love or something that needs to be realized, that we’re tested.
Joy Harjo
Bottom line, I have to follow what my soul says, or my spirit. And my spirit said that poetry and the arts should be without borders, should be without political borders.
Joy Harjo
When you play a sax, that saxophone is irreverent. It’s noisy; it’s a trickster… you cannot hide the saxophone in your hands, so it’s a good teacher.
Joy Harjo
I’ve always loved the desert. I’ve spent most of my life in the Southwest. It’s certainly influenced my work. I used to dream about it when I was young.
Joy Harjo
You just go where poetry is, whether it’s in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there’s live poetry or recordings.
Joy Harjo
I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.
Joy Harjo
I don’t like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We’re human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.
Joy Harjo
Most people don’t know that Congo Square was originally a Muscogee ceremonial ground… in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz.
Joy Harjo