Natasha Trethewey Inspirational Quotes (9)

My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.

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

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.

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 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.

There are indeed all sorts of men/ who visit here: those who want/ nothing but to talk or hear the soft tones/ of a woman's voice others prefer/ simply to gaze upon me, my face/ turned from them as they touch/ only themselves. And then there are those,/ of course, whose desires I cannot commit/ to paper.

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

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