“What we see, we see and seeing is changing”

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.

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

Be grateful simply for being alive. When you are grateful for life, pure and simple, your life becomes one you can be grateful for. That may strike you as circular or even backward logic, but your attitude really does have an effect on how things work out.

If you chance your focus – you will change your life.

I’m a different person today than I was yesterday. I live for the moment and everything that happens in my life changes me.

My life changed irrevocably four-and-a-half years ago when my spine failed and collapsed. I spent two years on the floor, in excruciating, debilitating and unrelenting pain.

Nothing on earth has greater potential to change lives and carry out His kingdom work in your community, than your local church.

Want to change your experience of life? Change the problem to the practice field.

In 1962, Sam Walton changed the face of retailing with Wal-Mart. As we speak, Amazon is again changing the face of retail with on-line buying.

I can’t change the world. I have to fix me.