Aberjhani Quotes

Biography

Type: Historian, novelist, poet.

Born: 8 July 1957

Died: 0

American-born author Aberjhani is an historian, columnist, novelist, poet, and editor. Although well known for his blog articles on literature and politics, he is perhaps best known as co-author of "Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance" and author of "The River of Winged Dreams". The encyclopedia won a Choice Academic Title Award in 2004.

Aberjhani Quotes

The words ‘I Love You’ kill, and resurrect millions, in less than a second.

Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.

Searching for a mind long lost I found it shaping colors and history near the cliffs of your heart.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.

To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.

I place my fingers upon these keys typing 2,000 dreams per minute and naked of spirit dance forth my cosmic vortex upon this crucifix called language.

Got just enough room to be a friend of yours. Oh I hope you got room
Got just enough room to be a friend of yours. Oh I hope you got room to be a friend of mine.

Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.

Dare to love yourself
as if you were a rainbow
with gold at both ends.

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret - you return to the beauty you have always been.

What a lover’s heart knows let no man’s brain dispute.

A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare
to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

And now we step to the rhythm of miracles.
-from The Light, That Never Dies

Love taught me to die with dignity that I might come forth anew in splendor. Born once of flesh, then again of fire, I was reborn a third time to the sound of my name humming haikus in heaven’s mouth.

Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

Un-winged and naked, sorrow surrenders its crown to a throne called grace.

Quote words that affirm
all men and women are your
brothers and sisters.

Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.

Where humanity
sowed faith, hope, and unity,
joy’s garden blossomed.

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

Time (again, Time) like the soul, wears many faces, many bodies and climates and attitudes. The past is one face, the present a second and the future yet another.

History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”
-from Past Present and Future are One

A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.

What is this slow blue dream of living,
and this fevered death by dreaming?

Human beings, in a sense, may be thought of as multidimensional creatures composed of such poetic considerations as the individual need
for self-realization, subdued passions for overwhelming beauty, and a hunger for meaning beyond the flavors that enter and exit the physical body.

Feet sandaled with dreams tread paths of vision leading to wisdom’s sharp peaks.

If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience… would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love?

This is what our love is––a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.

How many fears came between us?
Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell
rained smoldering pus
from skies made of winged death.
Horror tore this world asunder.
While inside the bleeding smoke
and beyond the shredded weeping flesh
we memorized tales of infinite good.
-from The History Lesson

Just above our terror, the stars painted this story
in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often
abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.

Love, Mercy, and Grace, sisters all, attend your wounds of silence and hope.

This world’s anguish is no different
from the love we insist on holding back.

In honor of Oprah Winfrey: Even greater than the ability to inspire others with hope is the power to motivate them to give as much to the lives of others as they would give to their own; and to empower them to confront the worst in themselves in order to discover and claim the best in themselves.

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

At the edge of madness you howl diamonds and pearls.

Even when muddy your wings sparkle bright wonders that heal broken worlds.

The same hot lightning that burns your blood with passion–– cools your fears with peace.

With my ninth mind I resurrect my first
and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace.

In this quiet place on a quiet street
where no one ever finds us
gently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.
-from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.

A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist.
Pink dragonflies fall from the air
and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks.
The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter.
Like the smile of a child separated
from his mother’s milk for the very first time.
-from poem Blood and Blossoms

Everywhere we shine death and life burn into something new…

The death of a dream can in fact serve as the vehicle that endows it with new form, with reinvigorated substance, a fresh flow of ideas, and splendidly revitalized color. In short, the power of a certain kind of dream is such that death need not indicate finality at all but rather signify a metaphysical and metaphorical leap forward.

Oh what a wonderful soul so bright inside you. Got power to heal the sun’s broken heart, power to restore the moon’s vision too.

Compassion crowns the soul with its truest victory.

Souls reconstructed with faith transform agony into peace.

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.

Rainbows introduce us to reflections
of different beautiful possibilities
so we never forget that pain and grief
are not the final options in life.

History dressed up in the glow of love’s kiss turned grief into beauty.

You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived.

On faith’s battered back calm eyes etch prayers that cool a nation’s hot rage.

Death wins nothing here,
gnawing wings that amputate––
then spread, lift up, fly.

In your hands winter
is a book with cloud pages
that snow pearls of love.

In the days when hyenas of hate suckle the babes of men, and jackals of hypocrisy pimp their mothers’ broken hearts, may children not look to demons of ignorance for hope.

On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other's humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.

We are living in an era in which billions of people are grappling to promote communication, tolerance, and understanding over the more destructive forces of war, terrorism, and political chaos that have characterized the beginning of the 21st Century.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.

The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi’s poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal.

Millions cheer the warrior
spilling blood across the ring
while the one who stands for peace
is ridiculed and shamed.
Must hearts forever suffer
from ignorance and greed?
Can bombs heal our souls
or set our spirits free?

Then came the healing time, hearts started to shine, soul felt so fine, oh what a freeing time it was.

In an age of bombs
guzzling blood, skylarks merge peace
with thought and action.

Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.

Your pain is a school unto itself–– and your joy a lovely temple.

Passion presented with a greater challenge achieves a greater goal.
- from The Sexual Side of Spirituality

Shine your soul with the same
egoless humility as the rainbow
and no matter where you go
in this world or the next,
love will find you, attend you, and bless you.

The dancing vortex of a sacred metaphor clashes horns and halos to make wounded music set to the tempo of a new era in brilliant labor.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.

Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.

What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands?

The story of the American Civil War is essentially one of human beings––Northerners, Southerners, Blacks, Whites, men, women–– holding themselves accountable for the future of a nation.

It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.

Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mind
most of our colors are amazingly the same.

An outrageous instinct to love and be loved blinded your arms to lines of propriety––Women and Men, Christians and Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, white, black, red, brown. An outrageous instinct to love and be loved executed your brain every hour on the hour.

The issue, perhaps, boils down to one of how perceptions or misperceptions of racial difference impact various individuals’, or groups of individuals’, experience of freedom in America. Some would argue that it goes beyond hampering their 'pursuit of happiness' to outright obliterating it.

First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.

Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.

The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else’s children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

Upon the lips of babes asleep I saw light embracing light and so allowed my syllables to rest there as a prayer they might sing in their dreams...

Dreams dress us carefully in the colors of power and faith.

Between death and hell a bridge shining silver wings offers his soul hope.

Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom, courage, and compassion the authority to do so.

Hope drowned in shadows
emerges fiercely splendid––
boldly angelic.

Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.

We can cry for years but sometimes gotta smile too.

Art gives its vision to beauty not always recognized. And it surrenders freely - whatever power it possesses to every sincere soul that seeks it. But above all else-it presents us with the gift of ourselves.

Poetry looking in the mirror sees art,
and art looking in a mirror sings poetry.

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