“Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.”

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

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.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.

The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

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

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.

To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.

It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away

What happens to one of the three or five or twelve will happen to them all. Whatever grief or triumph may touch any one will touch every one, as they are carried forward into the unknowable under the brilliant, terrifying sun which nourishes all.

Fain would I glide down a gentle river, but I am carried away by a torrent.

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land.

Have you finished your column for tomorrow’s headline?” it was vee. She came up beside me, jotting notes on the notepad she carried everywhere. “i’m thinking of writing mine on the injustice of seating charts. I got paired with a girl who said she just finished lice treatment this morning.

When you hear designers complaining about the challenge of their profession, you have to say: don’t get carried away-it’s only dresses.

May I say, for the benefit of those who have been carried away by the gossip of the last few days, that I know what’s going on.

Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen – that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen.