“Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.”

When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

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.

To pretend angels do not exist because they are invisible is to believe we never sleep because we don’t see ourselves sleeping.

Write your lustful words with the invisible ink of your tongue upon every part of my body, until my mouth begins to moan every single letter in poetry.

You have to have something that is forever, something that is invisible.

The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.

Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don’t let anything stand in the way of the light that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory.

Invisible things are the only realities.

Symbols are powerful because they are the visible signs of invisible realities.

In the midst of winter, I find within me the invisible summer.