Saul Williams quotes

Hip-hop is still cool at a party. But to me, hip-hop has never been strictly a party; it is also there to elevate consciousness.
-- Saul Williams

#Party #Hip Hop #Hips

Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life.
-- Saul Williams

#Love #Mean #Kissing

intelligence is intuitive you needn't learn to love unless you've been taught to fear and hate
-- Saul Williams

#Hate #Intuition #Taught

she stuck a bookmark in my heart and walked away
-- Saul Williams

#Heart #My Heart #Stuck

Legislation won't necessarily start a riot. But the right song can make someone pick up a chair.
-- Saul Williams

#Song #Legislation #Chairs

the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are waiting patiently for the past to die
-- Saul Williams

#Past #Waiting #Insightful

We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun. We are not afraid of the darkness. We trust that the moon shall guide us. We are determining the future at this very moment. We know that the heart is the philosopher's stone. Our music is our alchemy.
-- Saul Williams

#Heart #Moon #Darkness

I keep trying to forget, but I must remember. And gather the scattered continents of a self, once whole. Before they plant flags and boundary my destiny. Push down the watered mountains that blemish this soiled soul before the valleys of my conscience get the best of me. I'll need a passport just to simply reach the rest of me. A vaccination for a lesser god's bleak history.
-- Saul Williams

#Destiny #Self #Soul

Dying is something you have no control over. Why waste your life being afraid of it?
-- Saul Williams

#Death #Dying #Waste

only through new words might new worlds be called into order
-- Saul Williams

#Order #Might #World

I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.
-- Saul Williams

#Might #Term

Come, my love, we have oceans to sail.
-- Saul Williams

#Ocean #Sail

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.
-- Saul Williams

#Race #Ideas #Black

I didn't ever want to make a rap album. I considered it too limiting. Now that's exactly what I've gone and done
-- Saul Williams

#Rap #Gone #Done

I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.
-- Saul Williams

#Focus #Taste #Acquired Taste

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.
-- Saul Williams

#Rhyming #Rhyme #Making Up

Why shouldn't rap be esoteric, able to take in current events, history and criticism? I guess it's this old idea of containment - that rappers, because they're black, can't and shouldn't aspire to look outside the ghetto for influence.
-- Saul Williams

#Rap #Ghetto #Ideas

There is no music more powerful than hip-hop. No other music so purely demands an instant affirmative on such a global scale. When the beat drops, people nod their heads, “yes,” in the same way that they would in conversation with a loved one, a parent, professor, or minister.
-- Saul Williams

#Powerful #People #Hip Hop

If not then you must be trying to hear us and in such cases we cannot be heard. We remain in the darkness, unseen. In the center of unpeeled bananas, we exist. Uncolored by perception. Clothed to the naked eye. Five senses cannot sense the fact of our existence. And that's the only fact. In fact, there are no facts.
-- Saul Williams

#Eye #Poetry #Darkness

pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near (...) the beginning
-- Saul Williams

#Italian #Sharks #Blood

Niggy Tardust' is the voice of a generation, a generation that does not define itself simply by what it's born into.
-- Saul Williams

#Voice #Doe #Generations

The music aids the message, it's there to punctuate and abbreviate and shape the silence
-- Saul Williams

#Silence #Shapes #Messages

The hero is the person who's afraid to run away.
-- Saul Williams

#Running #Hero #Running Away

Two autumns and I have not changed enough.
-- Saul Williams

#Autumn #Two #Enough

More people than ever are slowly but surely turning their ears toward poetry
-- Saul Williams

#People #Ears

Sometimes our thoughts and feelings are our most prized possessions... and then there are times to let go of your possessions and wander.
-- Saul Williams

#Letting Go #Feelings #Sometimes

The only reason I've been so critical of hip-hop is because I've always been aware of the effect that it has, and the reflection that it gives of the African-American community
-- Saul Williams

#Reflection #Giving #Hip Hop

Jay Z and President Bush have a lot in common, that same brash confidence
-- Saul Williams

#President #Common #President Bush

We all have different relationships with music. But the music is always there
-- Saul Williams

#Different #Music Is

Fax me a fact and I'll telegram a hologram or telephone the son of man and tell him he is done. Leave a message on his answering machine telling him there are none. God and I are one. Times moon. Times star. Times sun. The factor is me. You remember me.
-- Saul Williams

#Stars #Son #Moon

I'm very excited about the resurgence of vinyl which seems to parallel a growing interest in live performance
-- Saul Williams

#Growing #Excited #Vinyl

I've always been inspired by a lot of work coming out of the UK
-- Saul Williams

#Inspired #Coming Out

Hip-hop is too young to put a definition on it
-- Saul Williams

#Hip Hop #Hips #Definitions

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written
-- Saul Williams

#Thinking #Fool #Doe

Some rather seek up high Than dig and grind that inner truth
-- Saul Williams

#Grind

There is nothing more negligent than attempting to address a problem one finds on a branch than by censoring the leaves.
-- Saul Williams

#Addresses #Branches #Problem

What's wrong with hip-hop is the system that controls the definition of it. There needs to be more balance on the airwaves.
-- Saul Williams

#Hip Hop #Balance #Definitions

The most powerful political voices are those with a different way of seeing and processing the world and the sounds that emanate from it.
-- Saul Williams

#Powerful #Voice #Political

I am hoping for peaceful transition into a new age. Obama has already played a great role in initiating us into that vision. If he were to be harmed in any way, it would spawn the birth of a million Obamas.
-- Saul Williams

#Peaceful #Vision #Age

The downfall of the industry seems to actually be good for art. I think the industry will find their way once the focus shifts from its greed-based origins, downsizes, and begins to support creative visions that speak to our times and shifting ideals.
-- Saul Williams

#Art #Thinking #Support

the anchor man thrown overboard has simply rooted us in history's repeating cycle
-- Saul Williams

#Men #Anchors #Overboard

i laced my shoes with sorrow and walked a weary road dead end streets don't come undone with double knots wing tipped shoes that walk on air through vacant lots
-- Saul Williams

#Air #Wings #Shoes

When I can feel you breathing into me i, like a stone gargoyle atop some crumbling building, spring to life a resuscitated angel.
-- Saul Williams

#Spring #Angel #Breathing

Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun
-- Saul Williams

#Book #Autumn #Void

The wind is the moon's imagination wandering.
-- Saul Williams

#Moon #Wind #Imagination

this is her body this is her blood
-- Saul Williams

#Blood #Body

Fax me a fact, and I'll telegram a hologram.
-- Saul Williams

#Facts #Fax #Holograms

My love is my soul's imagination... how do I love you... imagine.
-- Saul Williams

#Love You #Love Is #Imagination

I think it's a mistake where rap music is these days. It doesn't seem to be able to look out of the ghetto and that's ultimately unfortunate, because it defines our limitations.
-- Saul Williams

#Mistake #Rap #Ghetto

I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the 'black people's CNN.' Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It's biased, and highly suspect.
-- Saul Williams

#Cnn #People #Hip Hop

My father's a preacher, my mother's a teacher, thus I rhyme.
-- Saul Williams

#Mother #Teacher #Father

I dance for no reason, for reasons you can't dance, Call me an activist of intellectualized circumstance You can't learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts Spirit, soul, can't be store-bought.
-- Saul Williams

#Soul #Steps #Spirit

I surrendered my beliefs and found myself at the tree of life injecting my story into the veins of leaves only to find that stories like forests are subject to seasons
-- Saul Williams

#Tree #Veins #Forests

If we're gonna progress as a people we are going to realise that, as one of my favourite poets says, the other is a lie. There are no other people. Race is a social construct.
-- Saul Williams

#Lying #Race #People

A lie preserved in stained glass doesn't make it more true.
-- Saul Williams

#Lying #Glasses #Stained Glass

For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our children so long for the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fathers we live
-- Saul Williams

#Mother #Children #Father

Talk to strangers when the family fails and friends lead you astray when Buddha laughs and Jesus weeps and it turns out God is gay. 'Cause angels and messiahs love can come in many forms: in the hallways of your projects, or the fat girl in your dorm, and when you finally take the time to see what they’re about perhaps you find them lonely or their wisdom trips you out.
-- Saul Williams

#Girl #Lonely #Jesus

i am like a survivor of the flood walking through the streets drenched with God surprised that all of the drowned victims are still walking and talking
-- Saul Williams

#Talking #Survivor #Victim

she kissed as if she, alone, could forge the signature of the sun
-- Saul Williams

#Signatures #Sun

They say that I am a poet I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores I am unsure as to whether they ever reach and for that matter as to whether I ever get my point across or my love
-- Saul Williams

#Sea #Bottles #Matter