Catching the Light Quotes

“The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“My path is made of poetry and music, characterized by rowdiness and sunflowers, and given life by everyone I have met along the way in this process of becoming human. (When I say "everyone," I don't mean just us ornery two-legged beings.)”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“In my community, we are taught that leadership qualities include humility, compassion, a sense of fairness, the ability to listen, preparation and carry-through, a love for the people, and a strong spiritual center that begins with a connection to Earth.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Eventually, we all make it home, and we each make an individual path by any means.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“That was struggle enough; however, there was another plane of consciousness on which I was fighting every night that I lay down to rest. As I slid into the borderlands between waking and sleeping, negative beings attempted to pull me into their darkness. I learned to escape them by using words to make a ladder to bring me back.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Through her eyes I came to see that all is spiritual and we either move about respectfully within it, or we are lost.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Emerging from a story, a poem, the Earth, a time in history, or from the body of our mothers is sometimes explosive, chaotic, frightening, yet always awe-inspiring and humbling. We can use the energy to create fresh structures, or we can destroy or be destroyed. The energy can have power over us or empower us, and even what is destructive might clear the debris so that fresh life can emerge from embers or ashes.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“It was all connected, this poetics of listening, word making, and dancing. There was power to transform, to lighten the heaviness of the burden of being human. That's how I came to understand the power of poetry and music. It was a tool, but more than a tool. Words and music evoked a state of mind that lifted us up when racial and historical despair threatened.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“When she broke on Earth, the light in her was not broken. We cannot break light, nor can we destroy it.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“When the world as as knew it ended, we stood up again in the ruin, and found a way to keep walking through tears.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“When a despot ineptly sought to turn a country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry? It wasn't sleeping. It kept the poets up at night. We wrote against despair toward beauty, toward a truth that could imprison us for making liars out of the fools deposited in the seats of power, kept there by puppets who kneeled in piles of promissory notes.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“We must take care to feed the minds, hearts, and spirits of those coming up behind us--to offer songs, poems, and stories that will break open that which is hardened, expose that which is evil-minded or would harm, and remind us how we are constructed to bring forth beauty of thought and beingness.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“We make ceremony with words even as our words can lead us to the hells of destruction.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“It is in times like these that we face the most cunning of tricksters. We might even find a trickster in the seat of power.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Mary”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light

“Every poem is a prayer, a supplication in the cacophony of humanity.”
― Joy Harjo, Catching the Light