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

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.

I came to explore the wreck.

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

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

The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

As many times as it takes is the only count worth keeping.

When I love, I do it without counting. I give myself entirely. And each time, it is the grand love of my life.

Don’t count the number of friends you have, but the number of friends you can count on.

It is the poor man who’ll ever count his flock.

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

Be the one she can count on, and the one who never fails to make her smile.

Stop counting the reasons why they should be loved and start counting the many reasons why you are the one who is worth loving.

Wherever you are my love, know that we can still see the same moonlight whilst counting the same stars.