Angelina Jolie pays tribute to poet Amanda Gorman

Angelina Jolie pays tribute to poet Amanda Gorman at the Variety‘s Power of Women on Thursday night. She attended the event with her daughter Zahara Jolie-Pitt.

She said, “The young woman of grace, who stepped fearlessly to the podium on inauguration day. Not just the youngest but the strongest voice we could ask for in that moment. The Amanda we see today might seem as if she leapt into our times, fully formed, to summon our better angels. But there was an Amanda we didn’t see".

“A little girl with a speech impediment. In her own words, ‘a buck-toothed, kinky-haired, speech-garbled 7-year-old.’ Scribbling in her journal, on the school bus and park bench. wrestling with language, puzzling out meaning and rhyme, inventing her own dictionary. All those hours of thought and creation forged the unfaltering woman you see today".

"There was “nothing more beautiful, more challenging and more unsettling perhaps than the free mind of the thinking woman. That is surely why so much effort is put into constraining her.”

She ended her speech with by saying, “Those who have the power of free speech – the weapon of free speech – must combine to defend those who do not. We need voices like Amanda’s, those lights in the dark. May you burn fiercely, and light the way for others.”



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