“No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.”

"Many Rivers To Cross" (1981); later published in Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)
Context: I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive.
I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death.
And I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently.
And I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became my mother, the life of that woman was taken; I say it was taken away.

Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Source: Bone: Dying into Life (2000), p. 241

Source: Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

To his followers during the assassination attempt by the Muslim Brotherhood, as quoted in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
Context: Let them kill Nasser! What is Nasser but one among many? I am alive, and even if I die, all of you are Gamal Abdul Nasser!

The Third Notebook:Part Two
No Longer Human

Source: The Power of Now (1997) Introduction

Source: Into the Wild

7th Public Discussion, Saanen, Switzerland (10 August 1971)
1970s