“Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.”

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.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.

It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.

Are you fully conscious of your worth? Are you a person or a universe?

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

An intention is a quality of consciousness that you bring to an action.

Every intention sets energy into motion Whether you are conscious of it or not.

Were it not for the consciousness of Christ in my life, hour by hour, I could not go on. But He is teaching me the glorious lessons of His sufficiency, and each day I am carried onward with no feeling of strain or fear of collapse.

Real meditation is not done by us. It is done by our Inner Pilot, the Supreme, who is constantly meditating in and through us. We are just the vessel, and we are allowing Him to fill us with His whole Consciousness.

Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.

Art is a form of consciousness.