Clifton Quotes

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

may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back

Some people standby you in your darkest hour while others walk away; only a select few march towards you and become even closer friends.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

the lesson of the falling leaves the leaves believe such letting go is love such love is faith such faith is grace such grace is god i agree with the leaves

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

If you make a deal with a fool, don't be surprised when they act foolishly.

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

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

I find I don't learn a lot while I'm talking

they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and I keep on remembering mine

Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.

But really, aren't there bits of magic everywhere we look?' Dr. Clifton continues. 'We've just stopped seeing it that way.

We cannot create what we can't imagine.

I am running into a new year and the old years blow back like a wind that I catch in my hair like strong fingers like all my old promises and it will be hard to let go of what I said to myself about myself when I was sixteen and twenty-six and thirty-six but I am running into a new year and I beg what i love and I leave to forgive me.

listen, you a wonder. you a city of a woman. you got a geography of your own. listen, somebody need a map to understand you. somebody need directions to move around you. listen, woman, you not a noplace anonymous girl; mister with his hands on you he got his hands on some damn body!

won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.

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

A bottle of wine begs to be shared; I have never met a miserly wine lover

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

There are defining moments in one's life when you learn about yourself, and you deposit that knowledge in the experience account, so you can draw on it at some later date.

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

I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being Black and/or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy.

You can often judge the character of a person by the way he treats his fellow men.

The sign of a great man is how you handle defeat. - Old Jack

I knew what she was, and it made no difference at all. She was hard, as ruthless as she was beautiful, as brittle as bone china.

The worst moment of any campaign is waiting for the sun to rise on the morning of the battle

You are the one I am lit for. Come with your rod that twists and is a serpent. I am the bush. I am burning I am not consumed.

Sometimes an abundance of sympathy can be more overwhelming than solitude

they will empty your eyes of everything you love

Time spent on preparation is seldom wasted.

A work of art is worth what someone will pay for it.

Dr. Seuss provided "ingenious and uniquely witty solutions to the standing problem of the juvenile fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole.

You see, the problem with being a bully is that on the flipside of that particular coin, you’ll find the imprint of a coward.

Good night, good night, parting is such sweet sorrow,' she whispered 'That I shall say good night till it be morrow,' Harry replied.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

the lost women I need to know their names those women I would have walked with, jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom I would have joined After a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names?

so many languages have fallen off the edge of the world

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

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history

only a fool blames the messenger.

No time like the present

blessing the boats (at saint mary’s) may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

If someone gives you permission, they can take it away. I give myself permission.

After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself. It was painful to watch, because Clifton could not see it, her self-education.

Wishes For Sons i wish them cramps. i wish them a strange town and the last tampon. I wish them no 7-11. i wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. i wish them one week late. later i wish them hot flashes and clots like you wouldn't believe. let the flashes come when they meet someone special. let the clots come when they want to. let them think they have accepted arrogance in the universe, then bring them to gynecologists not unlike themselves.

The literature of America should reflect the children of America.

Dream and imagine what you want and you will bring it into reality.

Cheese - milk's leap toward immortality.

His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn’t that enough to tell? Isn’t it all you need to know?

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

Sometimes it’s an advantage to be disadvantaged,

You’re so bossy.” “Why is a woman always described as bossy, when if a man did the same thing he’d be thought of as decisive, commanding and displaying qualities of leadership?

dreaming your x-ray vision could see the beauty in me.

Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded."... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.

Clifton, in life you get what you deserve, no more and certainly no less.

The director mentions the whispers about Clifton's sexual orientation, a supposed gig on a porn site years ago, a rumor about a very famous actor and a tryst in Santa Barbara and Clifton's denial in a Rolling Stone cover story about the very famous actor's new movie which Clifton had a small part in: 'We're so into girls it's ridiculous.

To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

her dangling braids the color of rain.

a tongue blistered with smiling

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.

If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone's life rather than a worldclass version of your own

oh antic God return to me my mother in her thirties leaned across the front porch the huge pillow of her breasts pressing against the rail summoning me in for bed. I am almost the dead woman’s age times two. I can barely recall her song the scent of her hands though her wild hair scratches my dreams at night. return to me, oh Lord of then and now, my mother’s calling, her young voice humming my name.

[Wine is] poetry in a bottle.

i am rejuvenated bones rising from the dear floor where they found you

When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.

An unguarded comment often proves every bit as valuable as a response to a direct question.

Rosalind exploded with a shriek worthy of a tea-kettle.

Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

In the end, it all comes down to how you cope with the unforeseen.

they are shrouding words so that families cannot find them.

In any conversation, it's often something that seems quite insignificant at the time that gives you the piece of information you're looking for.

A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk's leap toward immortality.

The moon is queen of everything. She rules the oceans, rivers, rain. When I am asked whose tears these are; I always blame the moon.

if you’ve got a problem, sleep on it before you make a decision you might later regret. Things always look rosier in the morning.

For the Indians, cricket is not a game, it’s a religion.

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

She just stood there and looked at the empty highway, and you could almost tell how bored she was by the way she stood.

If you've struck gold, why go in search of brass?

The English are the biggest snobs on earth Harry.

Some clever children don’t discover how bright they are until after they’ve left school,’ continued Mr Holcombe, ‘and then spend the rest of their lives regretting the wasted years.

You will see by this that no man should be judged by another here in this life, for the good or evil he has done. Deeds may be properly judged, whether they are good or bad, but not men.

But if you find yourself thinking in the future, if you find yourself actually anticipating the activity-'When can I do this again?'-it is a pretty good sign that you are enjoying it and that one of your talents is in play.

Self-confidence seemed to me more mimicry than anything else and I suggested visiting Clifton Zoo to watch the leaders in a group of baboons, and learn from them: make your gestures slow and deliberate; cultivate a deeper voice; appear casual at all times; eschew all rapid movements. That was all you had to do to look confident.

King Cygnus dozed in his chair, and a dark shadow curled up in the window seat. That dark shadow happened to have a name, which happened to be Darcy; but nobody really notices dark shadows, even named ones. They have a habit of lurking about. People learn to ignore them after a while.

coffin nails. Once Stan had left for

walked erect out of my sleep

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

The only possible failure would be never managing to find the right role or the right partners to help you realize that strength.

Don't be afraid of poetry.

One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.

these hips are big hips. they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places.

The 'big five' factors of personality are neuroticism (which reflects emotional stability), extroversion (seeking the company of others), openness (interest in new experiences, ideas, and so forth), agreeableness (likability, harmoniousness), and conscientiousness (rule abidance, discipline, integrity).

From this point of view, to avoid your strengths and to focus on your weaknesses isn't a sign of diligent humility. It is almost irresponsible. By contrast the most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it.

In Martin Seligman's words, 'Psychology is half-baked, literally half-baked. We have baked the part about mental illness. We have baked the part about repair and damage. But the other side is unbaked. The side of strengths, the side of what we are good at, the side…of what makes life worth living.

shapeshifter poems by Lucille Clifton 1 the legend is whispered in the women's tent how the moon when she rises full follows some men into themselves and changes them there the season is short but dreadful shapeshifters they wear strange hands they walk through the houses at night their daughters do not know them 2 who is there to protect her from the hands of the father not the windows which see and say nothing not the moon that awful eye not the woman she will become with her scarred tongue who who who the owl laments into the evening who will protect her this prettylittlegirl 3 if the little girl lies still enough shut enough hard enough shapeshifter may not walk tonight the full moon may not find him here the hair on him bristling rising up 4 the poem at the end of the world is the poem the little girl breathes into her pillow the one she cannot tell the one there is no one to hear this poem is a political poem is a war poem is a universal poem but is not about these things this poem is about one human heart this poem is the poem at the end of the world Credit: Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton.

But not unlike the gremlins in the film of the same name who were transformed into nasty little critters if they were splashed or if they were fed after midnight, irrelevant nontalents can mutate into real weaknesses under one condition: As soon as you find yourself in a role that requires you to play to one of your nontalents-or area of low skills or knowledge-a weakness is born.