June Jordan Quotes about Children

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death:

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify. And we will have to allow them the choice, without fear of death: that they may come and do likewise or that they may come and that we will follow them, that a little child will lead us back to the child we will always be, vulnerable and wanting and hurting for love and for beauty.

June Jordan

Love, Hurt, Children

1978 Keynote address for Child Welfare League of America. Collected as 'Old Stories: New Lives' in Moving Towards Home (1989).

As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.

June Jordan

Children, May, Taught

June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.133, Basic Books

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

June Jordan

Girl, Children, Hippie

Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

June Jordan

Children, Motherhood, Thinking

To rescue our children we will have to let them save us from the power we embody: we will have to trust the very difference that they forever personify.

June Jordan

Children, Differences, Forever

1978 Keynote address for Child Welfare League of America. Collected as 'Old Stories: New Lives' in Moving Towards Home (1989).

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.

June Jordan

Children, Motherhood, Names

June Jordan (2003). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.277, Basic Books

The courts cannot garnish a fathers salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.

June Jordan

Children, Father, Kids

June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.159, Basic Books