Life & Wisdom Quote by June Jordan

June Jordan treats language less like a neutral tool than a living thing you can handle well or mishandle badly. “Worry words” is a sly, physical verb: to worry something is to rub it, tug at it, keep working it until it shows its grain. That phrase carries both craft and anxiety, suggesting that writing is never effortless polish; it’s pressure, persistence, abrasion. You don’t “use” words, you trouble them.

Her bifurcation is the pivot. One way is aesthetic ambition: “hoping for the greatest possible beauty.” Jordan doesn’t mock beauty, but she frames it as hope, not certainty, and that matters. Beauty here is aspiration, a standard you chase knowing it can become a seduction: the gorgeous sentence that smooths over what should remain jagged.

The other way is bluntly ethical: “to tell the truth.” The line lands with an almost austere clarity, making truth feel like an alternative discipline, not a mood. The subtext is Jordan’s lifelong insistence that language is political material. As a Black feminist poet and essayist writing through the late 20th century’s battles over race, gender, war, and state violence, she understood how “beautiful” language can be used to launder harm, how official narratives rely on elegance, euphemism, and “reasonable” phrasing to make injustice sound inevitable.

So the intent isn’t to choose beauty or truth as opposites; it’s to expose the writer’s dilemma: do you make art that dazzles, or testimony that costs? Jordan implies the best writing worries words hard enough to do both, refusing prettiness that lies and refusing “truth” that can’t sing.