“Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.”

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe.

That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.

We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.

Do not presume, well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed, to criticize the poor

Those that think my clothes are androgynous also still believe that women should look like Barbie dolls. That’s precisely the problem, the deep-rooted assumptions about what is feminine.

A man who murders another shortens by a few brief years the life of a human being; but he who votes to increase the burden of debts upon the people of the United States assumes a graver responsibility.

Show people tend to treat their finances like their dentistry. They assume the man handling it knows what he is doing.

Darwin begins by assuming life upon the earth; the Bible reveals the source of life and chronicles its creation.

If we speak poorly about that which we do well, people will assume we perform poorly!

The New Atheists are not open or willing to go where the evidence leads, unless that evidence sustains their own naturalistic assumptions. They have covertly reduced all philosophical thought and deduction to– ironically-fait h!

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.