“When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet”

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.

Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.

I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.

When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.

That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

The moment of change is the only poem.

What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.

If it was up to me, I would just wear jeans and t-shirts, even to red carpets, but then no one would photograph me, so that would make me very sad. So you know, I’ve gotta keep up with the rest of the female population and sometimes try a little harder.

Often you see people on the red carpet with tight up-dos, but that makes me feel stiff.

I’m always on a red carpet . . . the other day I thought, this ain’t bad. You can meet people on it.

We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

It’s easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world.

I love to love. However, you won’t see anybody walking the red carpet with me until I’m married.

There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.