“In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.”

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.

the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.

Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

I always look old when I work because I get so upset and tense that my face wrinkles up like a prune, I can’t stop it.

The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.

She was–I keep using the past tense; I ought to say she is–one of those people who, at first sight, look plain, are quiet, unassertive, unmemorable even. But who, when they start to talk and you get to know them.