Quotes from Amanda Gorman

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

To hone my voice, I read everything, from books to cereal boxes, three times: once for fun, the second time to learn something new about the writing craft, and the third time was to improve that piece.

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.

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.

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

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it's this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.

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

It wasn't until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Poetry is a weapon. It is an instrument of social change...and poetry is one of the most political arts out there because it demands that you rupture and destabilize the language in which you're working with. Inherently, you are pushing against the status quo. And so for me, it's always existed in that tradition of truth-telling.

The first bud of spring sings the other seeds into joining her uprising.

There is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it."

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

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

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.

One of my delays was in speech and speech pronunciation, and also the auditory processing issue just means I really struggle as an auditory learner.

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.

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.

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

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