“A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.”

That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.

We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

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

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.

Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.

I’m selling more records on my own than I did on major labels.

I really like working by myself without any distractions, learning from my own mistakes.

You are your own teacher. Looking for teachers can’t solve your own doubts.

The courage to decide that I have a voice and need to do what I love. To believe that this opportunity is not wasted on me. To own the fact that I am worthy.

I’m the kindest, most supportive friend ever, probably to my own detriment, but I hope that I am toughening up a little bit.

It’s easier to describe that shame, that horrible feeling of not being able to control your own life.

The Dhamma has to be found by looking into your own heart and seeing that which is true and that which is not, that which is balanced and that which is not balanced.

To observe and watch one’s own mind is something really interesting. The untrained mind will run and follow its old habit patterns. Because it has not been trained and taught, it will get lost in all kinds of stories and issues.