Quotations

"We need a world-wide Department of Peace."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945

"Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was going to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945

"No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945

"America's the great conundrum and the great dream and the great fascination: the new land, the new world, the new temple, the new city, and the great mess. The most handguns, bombs, weaponry, violence, the cop of the world etcetera. All the contradictions. Mediocrity versus something like indigenous jazz, one of the most evolved sophisticated musical forms on the planet."

— Anne Waldman, American poet, born 1945

"He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed."

— Lech Walesa, Polish electrician, born September 29, 1943

"Horses make a landscape look beautiful."

— Alice Walker, American poet, born 1944

"Anybody can observe the Sabbath, but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week."

— Alice Walker, American poet, born 1944

"I'm not lesbian; I'm not bisexual; I'm not straight. I'm just curious."

— Alice Walker, American poet, born 1944

"On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it."

— Alice Walker, American poet, born 1944

"Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth."

— Margaret Walker, American poet, born July 7, 1915

"You is born lucky, and it's better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain't lucky you is liables to lose all you got."

— Margaret Walker, American poet, died November 30, 1998

"I just naturally started to play music. My whole family played-my daddy played, my mother played. My daddy played bass, my cousin played banjo, guitar and mandolin. We played at root beer stands, like the .Drive-ins they have now, making $2.50 a night, and we had a cigar box for the kitty that we passed around, sometimes making fifty or sixty dollars a night. Of course we didn't get none of it, we kids."

— T-Bone Walker, American blues guitarist, born 1910

"I'm facing Niagara Falls - the wind and the mist and the dark and the peregrine falcons - and I'm going to stay focused on the other side."

— Nik Wallenda, American high wire artist, born January 24, 1979

"I've trained all my life not to be distracted by distractions."

— Nik Wallenda, American high wire artist, first to successfully walk over Niagara Falls, June 15, 2012