“Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness”

To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.

Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.

You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.

Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body – you thoughts, your actions, your food – the thing you feed your life.

Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force – and of the other person’s.

Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can’t derive this by fundamental analysis – you must think biologically.

My mother is a realist, and she’s had biological and adoptive children, and she said it’s no different: No matter what, they’re putting a stranger into your arms. You don’t know them yet.

It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.

Botany is based on fixed genera.