“The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.”

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination: this must change.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other – in balance with it… The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.

Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist – if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

Gandhi once declared that it was his wife who unwittingly taught him the effectiveness of nonviolence. Who better than women should know that battles can be won without resort to physical strength? Who better than we should know all the power that resides in noncooperation?

A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.

It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.

Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.

The point is to change one’s life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.

We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people’s minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.

The irony is when I originally wrote the song, it was called “Mary’s Lullaby.” I wrote it from Mary’s standpoint and it was in a higher key, a real falsetto, and it just wasn’t right.

Many people do not understand the difference between peace and a peace treaty. If you want to have real peace with normal relations between people, you need to have comprehensive peace.

I like to think illegal downloads only do real damage to the endless amounts of careless pop music though.

We believe that Lebanon has been the first real experience for all the Arabs.

I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.

I do feel free, I have patched things up with my ex-husband to the degree of this real friendship. We spend a lot of time together as a family with our son, no way will we be man and wife again.

I’ve been on a real Credence Clearwater kick. I’ve been collecting their albums on CD — right now I really like ‘I Put a Spell on You.’ I don’t know who actually wrote it; it might be a traditional, or like, an old blues song,

I’ve been on a real Credence Clearwater kick. I’ve been collecting their albums on CD — right now I really like ‘I Put a Spell on You.’ I don’t know who actually wrote it; it might be a traditional, or like, an old blues song,