“In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.”

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.

When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

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

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.

Youth ends when egotism does; maturity begins when one lives for others.

And when will there be an end of marrying? I suppose, when there is an end of living.

Irrespective of whether you have talent or not, one has to work hard. Just being talented doesn’t mean anything; you can end up wasting it before you realize.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.

I pray to God every day that he makes me the biggest superstar, but before that, I ask God to make me a good actor. Being a star is hard, but being an actor is even harder. I want to be both before I am done.

In the end, the truth finds a way to surface even if you don’t want it to.

I guess with the generation we live in, we just want to be entertained at the end of the day. A lot of artists make themselves accessible, so they feel like every artist should be like that. Some artists shouldn’t be so accessible, to me.

For a woman, forty is torture, the end.