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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Juan Felipe Herrera Quotes

All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people – a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it – big questions.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

My mother was a great storyteller and a great historian in her own way. She only made it to third grade. She came from Mexico City at the tail end of the Mexican Revolution and that kind of turmoil and chaos and frenzy and also excitement.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I want our young Latinos and Latinas to write their hearts out and express their hearts out and let us all listen to each other.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it’s almost something that we’re used to. It’s kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what’s going on, a real difficult issue that’s facing our communities, people listen.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I like marketplaces. I like train stations; I like being in trains. I like airports. I like walking down the street with a pen in my hand, writing, writing, writing.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I’m a political poet – let us say a ‘human’ poet, a poet that’s concerned with the plight of people who suffer. If words can be of assistance, then that’s what I’m going to use.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I gave my voice to poetry.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

The more we engage in society, the more firsts we have, then there will be a moment when we have no more firsts. Or maybe there will always be new firsts.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

My parents moved from ranch to ranch, valley to valley, town to town, but our roots in Fowler never really faded. For me, it’s a place of history, stories and songs, not just facts and figures.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Diversity really means becoming complete as human beings – all of us. We learn from each other. If you’re missing on that stage, we learn less. We all need to be on that stage.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like ‘half-Mexican.’

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry can tell us about what’s going on in our lives – not only our personal but our social and political lives.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

A pen is different from the pad, the key, moving your fingers across a screen. I like both. I like to work on sketchbooks, big old white sketch paper. I like how that feels, and I like to put different media on it. Then there’s the phone, smartphone, iPad: It’s the new page, and it’s not the same page anymore.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Migrants all over the world are pushed and pulled across borders by hunger, terror and climate change. It happened to my own family.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High – it’s all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I’m usually writing in English, and then I’ll get the hankering to change channels. And usually I’ll do that when I want to try a whole new set of keys, like musical keys.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Sometimes you can do things with Spanish – like verbs and genders – easier than you can in English.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I’ve worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

As a boy, I felt ashamed of being Mexican. I’d say I was Hawaiian.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I tell my workshop students, ‘I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you’re writing, you’re painting, you’re crafting, you’re making a design, you’re sculpting, you’re creating choreography, sound, a sound script.’

– Juan Felipe Herrera

I remember looking at James Joyce’s journals. It was just amazing – it looked like ants had written on the page. So much writing on one page, every corner of the page was filled. Some of the lines were underlined in yellow or blue or red. A lot of color, intense writing.

– Juan Felipe Herrera