“he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.”

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

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

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.

You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

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.