Quotes About Action

But anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.

If you want us to change the world someday, we at least have to live long enough to grow up!' shouts the child.

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.

I realize that if wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side.

I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours? And, of course I am afraid – you can hear it in my voice – because the transformation of silence into language and actions is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.

The enormity of our task, to turn the world around. It feels like turning my life around, inside out.

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a ouija board, cryptic comments from the other side. When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Don't make waves is good advice from a leaky boat.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.

Of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.

this action was a kind of shift from safety towards self-preservation. It was a choice of pains. That's what living was all about.

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.

Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.

In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don't hear the tab of the ale being popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. (reebok,chiat/day.)Just do it. (Nike, Weiden and Kennedy.)Dammit something just isn't right. (Me, to my bathroom mirror at four thirty in the morning when I'm plastered.)

The unfairness of your current status is unimportant. What matters is, can you do what you need to do? If

To live in regret and change nothing else in your life is to miss the entire point.

Trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and *being* is inside of it.

Self-pity isn't the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it: sad for me, I'm hurt. What's missing is the other half: and you need to do something about it.

The theater itself is not revolutionary: it is a rehearsal for the revolution. ~ Augusto Boal

The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action! ~ Augusto Boal

You should never let your fears prevent you from doing what you know is right.