June Jordan Quotes

I feel empowered to be a different kind of writer. The longer I stay here, the more light filters into my work. I feel very American. I belong.

I also argued before the war that the administration was underestimating Arab nationalism and Iraqi nationalism, that it was not going to be as easy to rule Iraq as they thought.

Yasser Arafat was the epitome of gracious Arab hospitality. I must have had 1000 meals with him. The problem was that he could never translate that hospitality to negotiations.

I have fought for many years. I have killed many men. I have never seen a foreigner die.

Throughout history, the chief arbiter of the influence of nations and cultures has been war.

War is human. People fight for the same reasons that the Greek Historian Thucydides identified nearly 2,500 years ago: fear, honor and interest.

I was proud my father spoke Arabic fluently - his father sent him to learn Arabic from a sheikh - and we had Arab friends. His task of understanding the Arabs - not only politics but poetry - was very important; he took it as a vocation.

Writing gave me the world.

We should keep on going along the path of globalization. Globalization is good... when trade stops, war comes.

Words are my life.

Fashion has always had the ability to affect lives, to touch people. But for the longest period of time, we've said, 'Oh, we're just pages of a magazine; that's what we all look at.' It's more than that.

For me, it is freedom, freedom from everything: when I write, I'm not a woman. I'm not a Muslim. I'm not a Moroccan. I can reinvent myself, and I can reinvent the world.

Holding women to the idea of 'write what you know' subtly reinforces the status quo. Writing is a chance to celebrate who we are. But it's also a chance to celebrate who we could be.

I do believe that for me, my own personal journey has been one in which my voice has also been appreciated.

It's been great to travel because I really enjoyed being 'Elektra', so it's not a problem talking about it.

I wish when I was 15 that I realized my voice was important and that even my thoughts and my opinions had value. Had I known, I probably would've spoken up more. I probably would've found my activism sooner and become a writer sooner.

It took a while for me to figure out how it all fit in, being a mother and being a woman and being a rock singer.

Arca was a project born immediately after I came out of the closet in New York.

As I got older, I had more experience with borders. Some literal - living in the dramatically blue misty mountains on the line between North Carolina and Tennessee, and living in California - home to expats, transplants, and refugees from both sides of innumerable borders.

We find our voice, we lose our voice, we retrieve it, honor it, and hopefully, learn how to share it with others and stand in the center of our power. Translation is a theme. Fear and courage are a theme.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

War is then not a relationship between one man and another, but a relationship between one State and another, in which individuals are enemies only by accident, not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of the fatherland, but as its defenders. Finally, any State can only have other States, and not men, as enemies, inasmuch as it is impossible to fix a true relation between things of different natures.

I was drinking tea the other day, and I thought: they used to fight wars over this.

Feminism's latest victory: the right to get your limbs blown off in war. Congratulations.

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.