“A language is a map of our failures.”

Experience is always larger than language.

Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.

The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.

It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.

What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power.

Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language.

Become fluent in the language of letting go. Learn to give people up before they hurt you beyond repair.

It’s always better to speak the language of the team. Not only for the direct contact with everyone.

What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.

I never saw myself as a director. It’s certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

We cannot look at the Latino community and preach ‘one language.’ No one gave them an English test before they sent them to Iraq to fight for America.