Quotes from Joy Harjo

Our children put down their guns when we did to imagine with us. We imagined the shining link between the heart and the sun. We imagined tables of food for everyone. We imagined the songs.

As I started a new life in Arizona, I knew I was losing myself. Even a lost place within yourself is a place, albeit liminal, a kind of border town. You can make a temporary home if you need to from found materials and shreds of forgotten dreams, and you can even dress to appear somewhat ordinary as you run away, a refugee from yourself. I rolled up the map of my known world and set it aside for some kind of strange autonomy.

We pay for light, pay for water, next thing you know We'll pay to breathe harder

Poet Warrior gave birth to two children And acquired more children along the way Through association, marriage, and love. There were more and more story bringers In her world. They became her fiercest teachers Of how there is no end to love And of how it plants itself Deeper than earth Or sky.

I began to understand that poetry did not have to be ... of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.

What a wild dilemma, how to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear

I was anything but history. I was the wind.

Was it sleep? Or the star-dancer come for her dance? There are stars who have names, who are dreams. There are stars who have families who are music. She thought she woke up.

There are still ancient symbols alive

earth, sky, stars circling my heart

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.

We make ceremony with words even as our words can lead us to the hells of destruction.

We were never perfect. Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was once a star and made the same mistakes as humans. We might make them again, she said.

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop. Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you. Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean. Give it back with gratitude.

Don't feed the monsters...Some are sent to you deliberately. They come from arrows of gossip, jealousy, and envy- and inadvertently from thoughtlessness. They feed on your attention, and feast on your fear.

Untitled Either a snail's moist web of moonlight, or someone's hot breath at four a.m. when the night has been too much, has eaten you whole. This is my life. It has been sifted through the bones of my body, through blood. It is all that I have.

Each collection of poetry makes a force field of energy.

In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone, Until somebody got out of line.

Time and how are the mysterious elements of any life.

To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird.

Sometimes it is like facing the dreamer who knows the you of blood and stars—

Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth's mind are connected.

Black squirrel on a slag of stone--carry me home.

The world doesn't always happen in a linear manner. Nature is much more creative than that, especially when it comes to time and the manipulation of time and space. Europe has gifted us with inventions, books and the intricate mechanics of imposing structures on the earth, but there are other means to knowledge and the structuring of knowledge that have no context in the European mind.