Anne Waldman Quotes

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

We care about shared values, culture and identity.

I'm very proudly European. I love that we have stories to tell of a place where we come from and we can relate to.

Tribalism, after all, is part of our evolutionary DNA. The need to identify with a group, to belong and commune with like-minded people is not only biological, it's what has helped motivate our desire for and devotion to all kinds of important cultural institutions, from organized religion to sports fandom.

When I walk through the city, I just think that I see my family. I see us in everybody, you know? I see us.

If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.

The fundamental law of human beings is interdependence. A person is a person through other persons.

Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. . . . it transcends the individual. . . . Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. . . . They are basic to who we are. A story composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within that community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be -- knowledge based on experience. These stories become the conscience of the group. They belong to everyone.

We can only be human together.

Isn't everyone a part of everyone else?

What we really are is a community of mind, knitted together by codes and symbols, intuitions, aspirations, histories, hopes - the invisible world of the human experience is far more real to us than the visible world, which is little more than a kind of stage or screen on which we move.

A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.

A people's literature is the great text-book for real knowledge of them.

Without social identity, there is, in fact, no society.

Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.

There is something on earth greater than arbitrary or despotic power. The lightning has its power, and the whirlwind has its power, and the earthquake has its power; but there is something among men more capable of shaking despotic thrones than lightning, whirlwind, or earthquake, and that is, the excited and aroused indignation of the whole civilized world.

Those type of people [in New Orleans] keep me happy and just smiling, you know? I just go hang out and talk with them and they tell me all types of old stories, and sometimes I might even pull my horn out in the middle of the block, and they're playing on beer bottles and different things, and we just do a little second line type thing, just us, four or five people, who are just having fun. That makes me day to be able to do that and go hang out with the people in the (Treme) neighborhood, and to do some shows around town, you know?

I know enough to know that no man is an island.

Thanksgiving reminds us that no matter our differences, we're still one people, part of something bigger than ourselves.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.

We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.

Understand me: I wish to be a man from somewhere, a man among men. You see, a slave, when he passes by, weary and surly, carrying a heavy load, limping along and looking down at his feet, only at his feet to avoid falling down; he is in his town, like a leaf in greenery, like a tree in a forest, argos surrounds him, heavy and warm, full of herself; I want to be that slave, Electra, I want to pull the city around me and to roll myself up in it like a blanket. I will not leave.

The tribalizing power of the new electronic media, the way in which they return to us to the unified fields of the old oral cultures, to tribal cohesion and pre-individualist patterns of thought, is little understood. Tribalism is the sense of the deep bond of family, the closed society as the norm of community.