“I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.”

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

It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

I’m just trying to rid the world of all these fevered egos that are tainting our collective unconscious.

This is taking [photos] from everybody – the entire collective memory of what the Earth looks like – and linking all of that together.

Colorado’s collective shale deposits contain somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 trillion barrels of oil. That’s almost as much as the entire world’s proven oil reserves!

A century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was a century of individualism it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism and hence the century of the State.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

I cannot accept the definition of collective good as articulated by a privileged minority in society, especially when that minority is in power.

People are not ants or bees. We do not reason or love or live or die collectively.