“A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.”

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories.

And humor has always been a weapon. You want to get even on somebody?

Even as children, human beings fabricate elaborate revenge fantasies.

If they are, they can fill in the details even better than I could, just with their imaginations.

They care about their club, and that’s why they always have something good to say, even when it is negative

I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive.

I decided Widmore was the evilest of the evil, but in the end, not even the writers knew.

I don’t speak anything very well. The longer that you travel, you find out that you really don’t even need to speak the language to get around and get things done, to live in those places.