Top 33 Rupi Kaur Quotes

There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love, and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.

Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.

With immigrant parents, they’ve had to sacrifice so much to survive, and they’re trying to preserve the culture they lost, so there are just so many boundaries.

Feeling ‘ugly’ or ‘unattractive’ seeps into your life like poison, and it affects everything. Feeling worthless does the same. We internalise these limitations, and it takes an internal revolution to get rid of them.

Truth, honesty, empowerment – it’s what I want for myself and my readers.

When writing for the page, the focus is on the design – how the words appear on the page. I try to make it as direct and simple as possible.

There have been articles saying that all women need to read my book. I ask, why not all men? In fact, that would be even more valuable because we women want to sit down with men and tell them – this is how we feel, this is what we go through.

I want to create a collection, almost like a trilogy of sorts. Whereas ‘Milk and Honey’ was very much like holding a mirror up to yourself, the second book is turning that mirror around and fixing it on the world. The book is a reflection of the times we are in.

The topics just kind of come to me. If they are relevant, it’s because they’re happening in the world around me, and it’s affecting me. Poetry is my way of dealing with it.

Really, at the end of the day, the only thing you can control is yourself; the only person you can truly educate is yourself. You have to redefine what beauty is to you so you can’t be affected by what people are saying.

If I body-shame a woman, it is more a reflection of me being critical of my body, me not being able to keep up to certain standards I have, and so making sure that the women around me feel the same way.

I felt voiceless for so long, I wasn’t ever able to say what I felt out loud. I didn’t know how to say it. Posting online presented itself as a comfortable medium. I could say what I wanted to say in a way I still felt comfortable. Whenever, however I wanted to.

I love Roald Dahl, Sharon Olds, Nizar Qabbani, who is a poet, and Junot Diaz.

The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that.

Growing up, I naturally embraced who I was, but I was always battling with myself. So I spent half my time being proud of being a woman and the other half completely hating it.

I always wrote stories, but I do remember a particular moment in middle school where I became passionate about essay writing.

Just because someone tells you they love you, it doesn’t mean they actually do.

I like B.C. because it’s so beautiful, but I think Toronto’s the greatest place because every corner of the world is here.

I realize I’m blessed to have the luxury of being a full-time writer. Not many people have that.

The pain that all people experience in life and the light that helps them champion through it all – it’s their lives and their stories and their love and will to keep living that moves me to write.

I think social media is… really cool in the sense that I don’t think that a writer like me would’ve found a readership if maybe Instagram wasn’t there.

I wasn’t trying to write a book; it wasn’t even in my vision. I was posting stuff online just because it made me feel relieved – as a way of getting things off my chest.

My heart is beating, and I’m breathing, and nothing anybody has ever done has changed that.

I think I only started to speak to people in grade four.

I won the speech competition in class, and I always say this was my first ‘spoken word performance.’ It was the first time I got on stage and recited something. I fell in love with the stage at the age of 12.

I wasn’t entitled to dream so big. The idea of me being a writer wasn’t even possible in my mind. Even when I began to write and first published, I couldn’t call myself a writer.

For me, the power of the poetry in ‘Milk and Honey’ is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It’s the emotion you feel once you’ve read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don’t get stuck on every other word, you don’t know what the word means.

In high school, I started saving up to get a nose job, which is so ridiculous. I had this job at Tim Hortons, and I was trying to save up $10,000 for a nose job.

‘You’re beautiful’ was the compliment I craved so much. I didn’t care if people called me smart or innovative – it was the number-one compliment I gave out to other women hoping it was given back to me. I heard people saying it to my best friends. It was the one I wanted to hear more than anything else.

‘Milk and Honey’ was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.

My parents didn’t allow me to do all the things the cool kids could do. I was quiet, reserved, and at some points, taken complete advantage of simply because of my sex and gender. For a while, in high school, I was so deep into self-hate.

You have to really understand that although certain memories or stories make you sad, you are not sad. Pull yourself out from that emotion and remember that.

The trauma of South Asian people escapes the confines of our own times. We’re not just healing from what’s been inflicted onto us as children… it is generations of pain embedded into our souls.