Top 33 Amanda Gorman Quotes

What’s really funny about being National Youth Poet Laureate is that not everyone even knows it exists.

Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.

Poetry is – it’s an art form, but, to me, it’s also a weapon, it’s also an instrument. It’s the ability to make ideas that have been known, felt and said. And that’s a real, I think, type of duty for the poet.

I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.

Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.

My Instagram doesn’t cover my insecurities, my lack of self-confidence, that week I spent crying… there’s a question of whether I should be sharing that online.

Most of my life I was particularly terrified of speaking up, because I had a speech impediment, which made it difficult to pronounce certain letters, sounds, and I felt like I was fine writing on the page, but once I got on stage, I was worried my words might jumble and stumble.

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice.

One of the most rewarding moments of my career is when I’m speaking to a child who tells me they have the same speech impediment that I had to overcome and that they’re going to keep writing or sharing their voice after hearing my story.

When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.

The oration of poetry, I consider to be its own art form and tradition.

But as for the future, I foresee a world which is more creative, more open, more loving, more ecologically friendly, more honest about its history and progress, and I think a lot of those contributions will be made by young people.

I grew up at this incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black ‘hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands.

You don’t have to be a poet, you don’t have to be a politician or be in the White House to make an impact with your words. We all have this capacity to find solutions for the future.

I was obsessed with everything and anything; I wanted to learn everything, to read everything, to do everything. I was constantly on sensory overload. I’d hoard dozens of books in my second-grade cubby, and literally try to read two at a time, side by side.

Poetry and language are often at the heartbeat of movements for change.

As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.

I think that’s the challenge of our generation: if we are all technology natives, how do we live with influence both online and off, and how do we make sure that both of those aren’t lacking in some type of deeper human connection and substance?

I try to approach reading in front of millions of people as I would reading in somebody’s living room.

I don’t want it to be something that becomes a cage, where to be a successful Black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. I want someone to eventually disrupt the model I have established.

Poetry is the lens we use to interrogate the history we stand on and the future we stand for.

When you’re someone who’s lived a life where certain resources were scarce, you always feel like abundance is forbidden fruit.

I think we run into issues when our online brands are not rooted in who we are, and I think we need to have explicit discussions with ourselves about who we want to be, what we want to represent, and how we want to express that.

I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch.

I was born early, along with my twin, and a lot of times, for infants, that can lead to learning delays.

My speech impediment wasn’t a stutter but it was dropping several letters that I just could not say for several years, most specifically the ‘r’ sound.

This is a long, long, faraway goal, but 2036 I am running for office to be president of the United States. So you can put that in your iCloud calendar.

I did a lot of sitting back and thinking about what I wanted for myself and what I wanted for my country: more unity, more support for the arts and more opportunities for young writers from marginalized groups.

That’s kind of the challenging thing about writing an inaugural poem. You’re speaking to everyone, but you don’t also want to speak for everyone.

Whenever I listen to songs, I rewrite them in my head.

What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.

As a public poet, people often don’t see the reality of my life.

My mom wanted to make sure I was prepared to grow up with Black skin in America.