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.”

“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.”

“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.”

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

“I chose poetry. Actually, poetry chose me.”

“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.”

“I don't like this romanticization of Indian people in which Indian people are looked at as spiritual saviors, as people who have always taken care of the land. We're human beings. But I think different cultures have developed different aspects of humanness.”

“There is no poetry where there are no mistakes.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Someone accompanies every soul from the other side when it enters this place. Usually it is an ancestor with whom that child shares traits and gifts.”

“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.”

“I never fit in. Everyone knew my dad was Indian. I was half-Indian.”

“I believe in the sun. In the tangle of human failures of fear, greed and forgetfulness, the sun gives me clarity.”

“I walk in and out of several worlds every day.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I wanted to see everything. It was around the time I acquired language, or even before that time, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. My concept of language, of what was possible with music was changed by this revelatory moment. It changed even the way I look at the sun.”

“We're all given something to do. And when we don't follow what we're supposed to do, we always know when we're off track.”

“I started writing to save my life.”