“Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.”

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.

I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.

The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?

An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.

I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

I may have aimed too high sometimes, asked too much of myself and demanded too little from those around me.

I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions.

I asked them to sit down since I’d come to walk around. I didn’t want them doing me favours.

She helped me wake up to the fact that I had a source of creativity that was my true creative nature and when I embraced it and asked for this presence in my life.

When I was creative director [at Estée Lauder], I was always being asked about my beauty must-haves. From there I had this fun idea to create a line of what was in my makeup bag. But I also love accessories, and people associate me with home, family, and beauty.

As a girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse; if I could still play with it now, I would! I used to love a well-arranged room: the furniture, the fabric, the lighting.

“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.

In private (Jerry Vines was with us), I asked Rogers what he did with the slavery passages of the New Testament.