Quotes from Jimmy Santiago Baca

I am learning to look at myself differently, to see the scattered remnants of hope and dreams and collect them again.

And so I pray I am today as honest with myself, with life all around me and below and above me, with all who I encounter.

And so I pray I am today as honest with myself, with life all around me and below and above me, with all who I encounter.

Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort, tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into a woman.

make this day a tree leaning over the river eternity and fuss about in its branches.

I sat back in my wooden chair as they signed the paperwork and stared down at the arm rests, studying the various layers of paint, the chips and cracks. How many hands had gripped them? I wondered. What lives were attached to those hands, what dreams were shattered, what sorrows were they trying to squeeze out of their souls?

I am a face in a trance, evoking duende. My face imbues breath and stuns you with star-spirit. I am grove-face, story-teller face, and dawn-bringer face. A face as common as carrots and celery, called upon as a father to be cook, waiter, servant, and maid.

I emerged from the black oil pools in the forgotten house of dreams in the wild backcountry of the heart. I am heir to the sun, child of Mother Earth and the Mayan galaxy. All the mountain cures and healing waters and winds and junipers run deep in my bloodstream.

It's the process of making-do, of the life I've lived between breakdowns and break-ups, that has made life worth living. I could not bear a life with everything perfect.

The word was the ember and the forest was my life.

From birth my tongue has had a fire for communication with trees and dirt and water

So clear off the streets when the sun goes down because darkness has always been hers, it's where she's lived all her life and she can see in the dark, cry in the dark, eat and love and hurt in the dark, it's hers and it's all we gave her, so when she catches us there in it, she doesn't give a shit who we are, what color we are, she'll bring it to us, make us feel a little of the darkness she's felt and lived in all her life.

Like scruffy dogs, we were always burying things and digging them up, things of value to no one else but to which we attached a mystical importance, creating with them imagined and magical worlds.

I warn her not to chase money— chase a dream, like underwater photography or hiking, build your own boat and sail around the world, serve and protect the earth, that's the kind of stuff brilliant minds pursue, not moneyed soul-shrinking status sh**— integrate your heart and soul into your walk, talk, hands and thrust your voice up to the sky as you sing your life out pure, free, hard and strong against any wind.

Being a human being without forgiveness is like being a guitarist without fingers or being the diva without a tongue.