“Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.”

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.

You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

Before I came here I was confused about this subject. Having listened to your lecture I am still confused. But on a higher level.

When you finally accept that it’s OK not to have answers and it’s OK not to be perfect, you realize that feeling confused is a normal part of what it is to be a human being.

You can’t expect insights, even the big ones, to make you suddenly understand everything. But I figure: Hey it’s a step in the right direction if they leave you confused in a deeper way.

You can’t pay enough money to cure that feeling of being broken and confused.

Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!

I guess this has been my confusion; where I went wrong. Thinking that love could possibly come as a thing without the burns.

Sometimes it is the spider that feels trapped in the very web she weaves.

My father confused me. From the ages of one to seven, I thought my name was Jesus Christ!