“Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.”

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.

You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

I have already expressed my opinion on this subject in treating of rent, and have now only further to add, that rent is a creation of value, as I understand that word, but not a creation of wealth.

My favorite subject was recess. Fortunately for me, I had a mother who believed I was smart.

The older dictators fell because they could never supply their subjects with enough bread, enough circuses, enough miracles, and mysteries. Under a scientific dictatorship, education will really work’ with the result that most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.

Gold and silver are no doubt subject to fluctuations, from the discovery of new and more abundant mines; but such discoveries are rare, and their effects, though powerful, are limited to periods of comparatively short duration.

In a certain sense a writer is ‘selected’ by his subject – his subject being the consciousness of his own era.

And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate.

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.

A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.