“Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.”

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.

So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts that could not exist without it.

Once I spoke the language of the flowers, Once I understand each word the caterpillar said, Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings.

The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.

Love was learning to read your vulnerability like a foreign language.

Through poems, I speak the language of my soul and the emotions of my body onto paper.

The meaning of a word is its use in the language.