Lucille Clifton

“I rise up above myself / like a fish flying...”

— Lucille Clifton

We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope.…

— Lucille Clifton

Tell the truth... maybe just to see clearly, as clearly as possible.

— Lucille Clifton

“who among us can imagine ourselves unimagined? who among us can speak with so fragile tongue and remain proud?”

— Lucille Clifton

“so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world”

— Lucille Clifton

“and at night my dreams are full of the cursing of me fucking god fucking me.”

— Lucille Clifton

“I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.”

— Lucille Clifton

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing.

— Lucille Clifton

I write from my knowledge not my lack, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether…

— Lucille Clifton

I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes…

— Lucille Clifton

blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out…

— Lucille Clifton

My Mama Moved Among the Days My Mama moved among the days like a dreamwalker in a field; seemed like what she…

— Lucille Clifton

Things don't fall apart. Things hold. Lines connect in thin ways that last and last and lives become generations made out of…

— Lucille Clifton

The end of a thing, is never the end, something is always being born like a year of a baby.

— Lucille Clifton

You cannot play for safety and make art.

— Lucille Clifton

Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.

— Lucille Clifton

the lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in…

— Lucille Clifton

“I come to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.”

— Lucille Clifton

“oh antic God return to me my mother in her thirties leaned across the front porch the huge pillow of her breasts…

— Lucille Clifton

“they are shrouding words so that families cannot find them.”

— Lucille Clifton

Children when they ask you why your mama so funny say she is a poet she don't have no sense

— Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both…

— Lucille Clifton

“was my first landscape, red brown as the clay of her georgia.”

— Lucille Clifton

You might as well open the door,my child,the truth is furiously knocking.

— Lucille Clifton

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

— Lucille Clifton