“The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.”

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

I’m a Buffalo wing magnet, a sandwich fanatic, a cheesesteak guy. But I’ll only get a cheesesteak in Philadelphia. No one else does it right.

People who have a confidence in their personal worth seem to be magnets for success and happiness.

The literal, basic thing of the stage is really like a magnet. It brings me back to earth.

I’m just concerned that as long as this caliphate exists, it provides this magnet for radicalization, and we’re likely to see more attacks like we have seen in San Bernardino, Chattanooga and elsewhere, and that’s the concern I have over pace.

In the world of existence there is no more powerful magnet than the magnet of love.

Your mind is a magnet. You don’t attract what you need or what you want; you attract who you are. And I love who I am!

Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life.

Profound joy of the heart is like a magnet that indicates the path of life.