Joy Harjo Quotes

You're coming with me, poor thing. You don't know how to listen. You don't know how to speak. You don't know how to sing. I will teach you. I followed poetry. ~ Joy Harjo

The radio is playing jazz, and I listen to the sound of the trumpet playing a solo until I become that sound. ~ Joy Harjo

I came into poetry feeling as though, on some level, these words were not just mine but my grandparents', their parents'. ~ Joy Harjo

Bless the poets, the workers for justice, the dancers of ceremony, the singers of heartache, the visionaries, all makers and carriers of fresh meaning - We will all make it through, despite politics and wars, despite failures and misunderstandings. There is only love. ~ Joy Harjo

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes. ~ Joy Harjo

The saxophone is so human. Its tendency is to be rowdy, edgy, talk too loud, bump into people, say the wrong words at the wrong time, but then, you take a breath all the way from the center of the earth and blow. All that heartache is forgiven. All that love we humans carry makes a sweet, deep sound and we fly a little. ~ Joy Harjo

I walk in and out of several worlds every day. ~ Joy Harjo

I believe that poets have to be inside their poems somewhere, or the poem won't work. ~ Joy Harjo

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. ~ Joy Harjo

I know I walk in and out of several worlds each day. ~ Joy Harjo

I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity. ~ Joy Harjo

At least I've had to come to that in my life, to realize that this stuff called failure, this stuff, this debris of historical trauma, family trauma, you know, stuff that can kill your spirit, is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge. You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you. ~ Joy Harjo

My generation is now the door to memory. That is why I am remembering. ~ Joy Harjo

I spoke with the crows before leaving for Los Angeles. They were the resident storytellers whose strident and insistent voices added the necessary dissonance for color. They had cousins in California, and gave me their names and addresses, told me to look them up. They warned me, too, what they had heard about attitude there. And they were right. Attitude was thick, hung from the would-be's and has-beens and think-they-ares, so thick that I figured it was the major source of the smog. ~ Joy Harjo

There is no separation. We are all from the same place. As long as there is respect and acknowledgement of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die. ~ Joy Harjo

But what captured him was a light in the river
folding open and open
blood, heart and stones
shimmering like the Milky Way. ~ Joy Harjo

I sit up in the dark drenched in longing. / I am carrying over a thousand names for blue that I didn't have at dusk. ~ Joy Harjo

When you play a sax, that saxophone is irreverent. It's noisy; it's a trickster ... you cannot hide the saxophone in your hands, so it's a good teacher. ~ Joy Harjo

I come from a long line of revolutionaries. ~ Joy Harjo

Sometimes, I think, in order to get to something that we really want or we really love or something that needs to be realized, that we're tested. ~ Joy Harjo

The woman hangs from the 13th floor window crying for
the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago.
She thinks she remembers listening to her own life
break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor
window on the east side of Chicago, or as she
climbs back up to claim herself again. ~ Joy Harjo

Most people don't know that Congo Square was originally a Muscogee ceremonial ground ... in New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz. ~ Joy Harjo

This morning when I looked out the roof window
before dawn and a few stars were still caught
in the fragile weft of ebony night
I was overwhelmed. I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into this room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.
Now the deer and I are trying to figure out a song
to get them back, to get all of us back,
because if it works I'm going with them.
And it's too early to call Louis
and nearly too late to go home.
[from poem, "Song for the Deer and Myself to Return On"] ~ Joy Harjo

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense. ~ Joy Harjo

If we cry more tears we will ruin the land with salt; instead let's praise that which would distract us with despair. Make a song for death, a song for yellow teeth and bad breath ~ Joy Harjo

I am a member of the Muskogee people. I'm a poet, a musician, a dreamer of sorts, a questioner. Like everyone else, I'm looking for answers of some sort or the other. ~ Joy Harjo

[...] my father staggering in drunk, beating my mother, the shame and hate in him burning, burning. Then he'd hit my brothers. And then me whom it was said he loved most. He'd save me for last, when his anger was ashes, when the fire was hottest. And then he's hold me, 'Sugar, sugar', he's croon, the tears so thick they made a lake on the linoleum floor. ~ Joy Harjo

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack in the universe. We saw the barest of all life that is possible. Bright horses rolled over and over the dusking sky. ~ Joy Harjo

All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice. ~ Joy Harjo

I was born with eyes that can never close... ~ Joy Harjo

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone ... She is all the women of the apartment building who stand watching her, watching themselves. ~ Joy Harjo

You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you. ~ Joy Harjo

When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers. They didn't understand that the sun is a relative and illuminates our path on this earth. ~ Joy Harjo

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate. ~ Joy Harjo

And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it. ~ Joy Harjo

I lay my body down in another city, another hotel room. Once Louis Armstrong and his band stayed here. Later the hotel fell to trash. New money resurrected it. Under the red moon of justice, I dream with the king of jazz. ~ Joy Harjo

Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you. ~ Joy Harjo

Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their families, their histories too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. ~ Joy Harjo

Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash.
You have gutted me but I gave you the knife.
You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire. ~ Joy Harjo

I've been present at birth, and death is just as present and in equal balance. And I've been present at death, and birth is just as present, again in equal balance. ~ Joy Harjo

Alive. This music rocks
me. I drive the interstate,
watch faces come and go on either
side. I am free to be sung to;
I am free to sing. This woman
can cross any line. ~ Joy Harjo

She exists in me now, just as I will and already do within my grandchildren. No one ever truly dies. The desires of our hearts make a path. We create legacy with our thoughts and dreams. ~ Joy Harjo

I started writing to save my life. ~ Joy Harjo

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds. ~ Joy Harjo

Moonlight

I know when the sun is in China
because the night shining other-light
crawls into my bed. She is moon.
Her eyes slit and yellow she is the last
one out of a dingy bar in Albuquerque -
Fourth Street, or from similar avenues
in Hong Kong. Where someone else has also
awakened, the night thrown back and asked,
'where is the moon, my lover'?
And from here I always answer in my dreaming,
'the last time I saw her was in the arms
of another sky'. ~ Joy Harjo

Vision

The rainbow touched down
'somewhere in the Rio Grande,'
we said. And saw the light of it
from your mother's house in Isleta.
How it curved down between earth
and the deepest sky to give us horses
of color
horses that were within us all of this time
but we didn't see them because
we wait for the easiest vision
to save us.

In Isleta the rainbow was a crack
in the universe. We saw the barest
of all life that is possible.
Bright horses rolled over
and over the dusking sky.
I heard the thunder of their beating
hearts. Their lungs hit air
and sang. All the colors of horses
formed the rainbow,
and formed us
watching them. ~ Joy Harjo

It was the spirit of poetry who reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway between panic and love. ~ Joy Harjo

In a way, we [poets] are listeners. I go to poetry because I don't have the words." - ~ Joy Harjo

A story matrix connects all of us.
There are rules, processes, and circles of responsibility in this world. And the story begins exactly where it is supposed to begin. We cannot skip any part. ~ Joy Harjo

My ancestors include Monahwee, who was one of the leaders in the Red Stick War, which was the largest Indian uprising in history, and Osceola, who refused to sign a treaty with the United States. ~ Joy Harjo

It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit. ~ Joy Harjo

Remember that you are all people and that all people are you. ~ Joy Harjo

I understood why women went back to their abusers. The monster wasn't your real husband, he was a bad dream - an alien of sorts - who took over the spirit of your beloved one. He entered and left your husband. It was your real love you welcomed back in. ~ Joy Harjo

I've always loved the desert. I've spent most of my life in the Southwest. It's certainly influenced my work. I used to dream about it when I was young. ~ Joy Harjo

Humans are vulnerable and rely on the kindnesses of the earth and the sun; we exist together in a sacred field of meaning. ~ Joy Harjo

Nothing ever stays the same, whether it be poems or humans. ~ Joy Harjo

I can't do anything
but talk to the wind,
to the moon
but cry out goddamn goddamn
to stones
and to other deathless voices
that I hope will carry
us all through. ~ Joy Harjo

True power does not amass through the pain and suffering of others. ~ Joy Harjo

When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else. ~ Joy Harjo

It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory. ~ Joy Harjo

Because Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands ~ Joy Harjo

The homeland affects you directly: it affects your body; it affects the collective mind and the collective heart and the collective spirit. ~ Joy Harjo

If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned. ~ Joy Harjo

We offered her flowers and signalled to her with our penises, but she did not respond with joy.'
'The men with the extra skins didn't look happy. They looked angry.'
'We went towards them to greet them, but they ran away.'
Snowman can imagine. The sight of these preternaturally calm, well-muscled men advancing en masse, singing their unusual music, green eyes glowing, blue penises waving in unison, both hands outstretched like extras in a zombie film, would have to have been alarming. ~ Margaret Atwood

The joy of heaven will begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven, and do its duties. ~ Theodore Parker

Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If you can get that table out of doors, so the sun can kiss the skin - if as you dine together you can also provide help for others - then, according to Myerson, you've won the lottery of life.[36] ~ Leonard Sweet

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses which were 'always and equally warranted for those of sound insight'. All others were irrational, merely symptoms of imaginations left idle, of memories out of work. And above these mundane responses, the only elevation allowable, the only valid transcendence, was a sardonic one: a bliss that annihilated the universe with jeers of dark joy, a mindful ecstasy. Anything else in the way of 'mysticism' was a sign of deviation or distraction, and a heresy to the obvious. ("The Medusa") ~ Thomas Ligotti

People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness. They point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

What we have instead are false memories aroused later and more pertinent to this later perspective than to the original events. Sometimes in matters of great emotion, one representation, retaining all the original intensity, comes to replace another, which is then discarded and forgotten. The new representation is called a screen memory. A screen memory is a compromise between remembering something painful and defending yourself against that very remembering. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

It was morning; through the high window I saw the pure, bright blue of the sky as it hovered cheerfully over the long roofs of the neighboring houses. It too seemed full of joy, as if it had special plans, and had put on its finest clothes for the occasion. ~ Herman Hesse

A 20/20 mindset produces clarity, joy, and peace in your life. It produces RESULTS. ~ Farshad Asl

So much in life seems inflexible and unchangeable, and part of the joy of running and especially racing is the realization that improvement and progress can be achieved. ~ Nancy Anderson

We can laugh from either joy or happiness, but we weep only from grief or joy ... Without the pain of farewell, there is no joy in reunion ... without the pain of captivity, we don't experience the joy of freedom. ~ George Vaillant

Find joy in simplicity and positivity. ~ Debasish Mridha

I saw myself as an electronic joy rider. ~ Kevin Mitnick

Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ears to relish it, a nose and tongue to taste it. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

There are thousands of agreements you have made with yourself, with other people, with your dream of life, with God, with society, with your parents, with your spouse, with your children. But the most important agreements are the ones you made with yourself. In these agreements you tell yourself who you are, what you feel, what you believe, and how to behave. The result is what you call your personality. In these agreements you say, "This is what i am; this is what I believe. I can do certain things, and some things I cannot do. This is reality; that is fantasy. This is possible; that is impossible." One single agreement is not such a problem. But we have many agreements that make us suffer, that make us fail in life. If you want to live a life of joy and fulfillment, you have to find the courage to break those agreements that are fear-based and claim your personal power. The agreements that come from fear require us to expend a lot of energy, but the agreements that come from love help us to conserve energy and even gain extra energy. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Jade?" He raised her chin with a finger when she didn't respond. She reluctantly returned his gaze, wanting the intensity in his eyes to be for her, not simply for the responsibility of her. ~ Brittney Joy

Make me laugh. Make me cry. Tell me my place in the world. Lift me out of my skin and place me in another. Show me places I have never visited and carry me to the ends of time and space. Give my demons names and help me to confront them. Demonstrate for me possibilities I've never thought of and present me with heroes who will give me courage and hope. Ease my sorrows and increase my joy. Teach me compassion. Entertain and enchant and enlighten me.
Tell me a story. ~ Dennis O'Neil

Buddhism teaches that joy and happiness arise from letting go. Please sit down and take an inventory of your life. There are things you've been hanging on to that really are not useful and deprive you of your freedom. Find the courage to let them go. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

I look around myself wildly, my heart bursting with grief and fear and joy. I am leaving, but I will take this place and its stories with me wherever I go. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

...No– but ours is a journey into ourselves, a walk with God every day! Ours is a book that we write, a smile, a love, a tear, a lust, an awakening, a learning, a joy, a laughter, a memory, a dream, a vision, a love, a love, a love and a love. Our life is now. And Heaven is always there, but this life isn't always there, but this life isn't always here. Heaven is always there for us but this life is a gift to us! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity (a new name). The boredom of spinsters and of women who can no longer find joy and fulfillment in marriage stems from an awareness of a barren, spoiled life. By embracing a holy cause and dedicating their energies and substance to its advancement, they find a new life full of purpose and meaning. ~ Eric Hoffer

Nothing opens the heart like a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes ... and whatever lies upon the heart ... ~ Francis Bacon

Not the dreams where we are hunted by the monsters, but the dreams where we are the monsters. We raise bloody hands to the sky and scream, not from fear, but from joy. The pure joy of slaughter. The cathartic moment when we plunge our hands into the hot blood of our enemies and there is no civilized thought to stop us from dancing on their graves. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Look for the good instead of the bad, the right instead of the wrong, the beauty instead of the blight, the joy instead of the sorrow. Do this and you'll always have something good to say. ~ Hal Urban

I am not suggesting that every one in ancient Egypt was altruistic, any more than are all the people in modern England. But I do say that the country was permeated with joy and fearlessness so far as its religious ideas were concerned, and that every one who by any stretch of courtesy could be described as a religious man was occupied not with thoughts of his personal salvation, but with the desire to be a useful agent of the divine Power. ~ Charles W. Leadbeater

Proverbs 21:15 NIV:
When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers. ~ Anonymous

I do not care about happiness simply because I believe that joy is something worth fighting for. ~ Criss Jami

When miracles happen, hope destroys hopelessness, joy overcomes pain, love conquers hate, and faith finds God in the midst of it all. ~ Cherie Hill

I've published several virtually invisible novels and several dozen even more invisible short stories over the years, all of which give me joy - unlike the cumulative experience of seeking publishers for them! ~ Scott Bradfield

The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy! ~ Charles Dickens

FORGIVE The People That Hurt You. God Will Pay You Back With Double The Joy ... Double The Victory. ~ Joel Osteen

And we screamed. We screamed our war cry, our shout of slaughter, our joy of being men in battle who are driven by terror. ~ Bernard Cornwell

Love is the key. Joy is love singing. Peace is love resting. Patience is love enduring. Kindness is love's truth. Goodness is love's character. Faithfulness is love's habit. Gentleness is love's self-forgetfulness. Self-control is being the reins ~ Donald Grey Barnhouse

You are here just to be, for no reason. You have no mission except to enjoy life, to be happy. The only thing you need is just to be the real you. Be authentic. Be the presence. Be happiness. Be love. Be joy. Be yourself; that's the main point. That's wisdom. ~ Miguel Ruiz

The right use of the exercise of the will is a condition of salvation, necessary without a doubt, but remote, inferior, very subordinated, purely negative. Muscular effort pulls up weeds, but only the sun and water can make wheat grow. The will cannot produce any good in the soul. The efforts of the will are only in place for accomplishing specific obligations. Wherever there is no specific obligation, we must follow our natural inclination or our vocation, which to say the commandment of God. The acts proceeding from inclination are evidently not efforts of the will. And in acts of obedience to God, we remain passive. Whatever pains might accompany it, whatever deployment of activity might be apparent, they produce nothing analogous in the soul to muscular effort. There is only expectant waiting, attentiveness, silence and immobility through suffering and joy. The crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience. ~ Simone Weil

I used to be a happy person. A person with a sparkle in her eye. I was carefree, easygoing, fun, and knew joy on a regular basis. I'm smart. I have a college degree from a good school. I've built a career from my degree and I'm good at it. I had friends. Lots of good friends. I used to go out. I was passionate about life and love and myself. None of that person exists anymore. She's been stripped of all redeeming qualities. ~ K. Larsen

Another kind of joy, more sober because more responsible, is mine today as well: that of entry into a place that we can strictly term outside the bounds of power. For if I may, in turn, interpret the Collège, I shall say that it is, as institutions go, one of History's last stratagems. Honor is usually a diminution of power; here it is a subtraction, power's untouched portion. ~ Roland Barthes

Let's be happy the way life takes shape, it is all decided and destined to be that way and we can't change anything unless we first change ourselves. ~ Auliq Ice