Natasha Trethewey quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Natasha Trethewey on Wise Famous Quotes.

Goodbye is the waving map of your palm, is a stone on my tongue.

Poetry's a thing that belongs to everyone.

the wages of empire is myopia

A man's pursuit of knowledge is greater than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

The act of making poetry is an act of hope.

You can get there from here, though there's no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere you've never been.
Theories of Time and Space

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

That morning, awkward and heavy...

When you begin to think about the past, you realize how much of it is lost to us.

Often people would mistake me for white when I was younger, and I didn't correct them; there would be a period of time that they just thought I was.

what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache?

I find myself frequently introducing myself to someone, saying that, you know, I've grown up black and biracial in the United States.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

I don't like a kind of workshop that is about editing
I don't want to sit there and be an editor. I don't want to tell someone how to "fix" a poem.

The yoke of my birth

I read the line over and over as if I might discern the little fires set the flames of an idea licking the page how knowledge burns

He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood

Even as I think of myself as a 'rememberer,' I also know my memory is probably doing all this work to reconstruct a narrative where I come off better.

Here is the threshold I do not cross: a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo, the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.

I think poets are people who are like this; for whatever reason you feel psychological exile because you're always an outsider...

Why not make a fiction of the mind's fictions?

I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.

I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have.

the dark foil in this American story

Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.

My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

My mother and my father divorced during the time that my father was getting his Ph.D. at Tulane.

What's left is palimpsest - one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write.

Dismissals of poetry are nothing new. It's easy to dismiss poetry if one has not read much of it.

My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.

From the catbird seat, I've found poetry to be the necessary utterance it has always been in America.