Quotes from Carolyn Forché

The heart is the toughest part of the body. Tenderness is in the hands.

One can live without having survived

the silence of God is God.

There is a cyclone fence between ourselves and the slaughter and behind it we hover in a calm protected world like netted fish, exactly like netted fish. It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing.

the Roanoke valley where mountains hold the breath of the dead between them and lift from each morning a fresh bandage of mist.

These ruins are to the future what the past is to us

It was as if he had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.

People think that what happens to someone else has nothing to do with them. They think that what happens in one place doesn't matter any place else.

When you are talking about stupidity, only the military knows the meaning of the word infinite

He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

That from which these things are born That by which they live That to which they return at death Try to know that

Memory a wind passing through the blood trees within us

Do Americans think of us? So she began as we squatted over the toilets: If you want, I'll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough.

it was becoming obvious that the war he had been anticipating, "in three to five years" might have already begun, as many wars do begin, he said, not with a major event reported in the news but with sufferings barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress.

Before enduring it we will endure it.

The tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse's mouth And the corpse The corpse is never mentioned In the hours before his empty body was found It was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of desiring, Yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived

Draw, Antonio, draw, said Michelangelo to one of his apprentices. Draw and do not waste time.

After beating Lorca with their rifle butts and calling him a faggot, they filled him with bullets. The grave, sought by many, has never been found.

You tell me you are a poet. If so, our destination is the same. I find myself now the boatman, driving a taxi at the end of the world. I will see that you arrive safely, my friend, I will get you there.

Go toward the light always, be without ships.

She began reciting something that sounded almost like litany: Aguilares, Padre Grande, Padre Navarro, aquí en San Salvador y en Aguilares y campesinos, "hundreds, three hundreds, all dead, even niños dead.

You are always asking me why the people don't do something, why they put up with this brutality, why they don't rise up against it, this and that. Okay. You're exhausted, you're shocked, you're sick to your stomach, and you feel dirty. These things are what people feel every day here—and you expect them to get themselves organized? You expect them to fight back? Could you fight back at this moment?

I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.

An ache of hope that you will come back— the cawing flock is not your coming — Carolyn Forché, from "Travel Papers," In the Lateness of the World: Poems (Penguin Press, 2020)