Rupi Kaur Quotes

Rupi Kaur

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 5, 1992

We are not outraged by blood. We see blood all the time. Blood is pervasive in movies, television, and video games. Yet, we are outraged by the fact that one openly discusses bleeding from an area that we try to claim ownership over.

Rupi Kaur

I think I only started to speak to people in grade four.

Rupi Kaur

A lot of Indian fathers don't know how to show affection. My parents really do love me, even though my dad has never been able to say those words to me.

Rupi Kaur

The trauma of South Asian people escapes the confines of our own times. We're not just healing from what's been inflicted onto us as children... it is generations of pain embedded into our souls.

Rupi Kaur

When I was little, my dad told me about Anandpur Sahib and the court of Guru Gobind Singh. That we came from a tradition of poets, warriors and artists who created when it was illegal to create... we're groomed to be reckless in the defense of what we feel is right.

Rupi Kaur

I felt voiceless for so long, I wasn't ever able to say what I felt out loud. I didn't know how to say it. Posting online presented itself as a comfortable medium. I could say what I wanted to say in a way I still felt comfortable. Whenever, however I wanted to.

Rupi Kaur

For some of my young female readers, it will be the first time they will have seen a Punjabi author be successful in the West. Because I'm dealing with topics that aren't always easily discussed, I know they will look up to me, because I would have done the same. So I just want to make sure I do right by them, wherever this takes me.

Rupi Kaur

My dad studies and practices homeopathy and Ayurveda medicine. He's a strong believer in both honey and milk as forms of healing. Honey is the one food that does not die. It does not expire. Growing up, he'd always be mixing up almonds or turmeric or gram flower with milk to cure a cough or a cold.

Rupi Kaur

I can go to all these cool places around the world, but when we land at YYZ, I'm like, 'Yes! It's flat. It's concrete. I'm okay with this; my people are here.'

Rupi Kaur

My writing is a product of how I would interact with things that have happened to me or things that have not happened to me but have happened to somebody else.

Rupi Kaur

I think social media is... really cool in the sense that I don't think that a writer like me would've found a readership if maybe Instagram wasn't there.

Rupi Kaur

The topics just kind of come to me. If they are relevant, it's because they're happening in the world around me, and it's affecting me. Poetry is my way of dealing with it.

Rupi Kaur

Why are brown women bullying brown women for body hair? Why are brown women bullying brown women for the same traits we all have?

Rupi Kaur

I have always been a fan of Salvador Dali, but Amrita Sher-Gil, who was an Indian-Hungarian painter, is another favourite. She was painting Indian women, and, growing up here, I'd never seen anyone paint Indian women, so that was really incredible to see a painting of someone who looks like you. I think that has a lot of impact on you.

Rupi Kaur

My favourite character in fiction was probably either James from 'James and the Giant Peach' or Ender from 'Ender's Game.' They were just ordinary people who were living under various amounts of struggle, and just to follow their journeys and see them break out of that and live extraordinary lives - I think that gave me a lot of hope as a kid.

Rupi Kaur

I haven't had the opportunity to study visual art, but it was always my first love when it came to artistic expression. I started drawing and experimenting with visual art when I was 5.

Rupi Kaur

Being that my parents and I were immigrants to Canada, I didn't have the most lavish life growing up.

Rupi Kaur

I wasn't entitled to dream so big. The idea of me being a writer wasn't even possible in my mind. Even when I began to write and first published, I couldn't call myself a writer.

Rupi Kaur

The pain that all people experience in life and the light that helps them champion through it all - it's their lives and their stories and their love and will to keep living that moves me to write.

Rupi Kaur

My gut is so strong. I feel like I have a lot of books in me, and they're going to come out because I said so. It's going to happen.

Rupi Kaur