“In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.”

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.

I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.

When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.

That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.

We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

The moment of change is the only poem.

What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.

Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.

Patch backed me into a tree and kissed me, hard. I regained my breath. “boys take not everywhere: that was a kiss.

Dont panic, i thought. But already my breathing was faster, shallower. You mean you can feel happy or sad or desire. A barely-there smile.

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.

Nice creepy reptile,” Frank said, very aware of the driftwood in his coat pocket. “Nice poisonous, fire-breathing reptile.

I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought.

A line is length without breadth.

There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.

Fat people who want to reduce should take their exercise on an empty stomach and sit down to their food out of breath…. Thin people who want to get fat should do exactly the opposite and never take exercise on an empty stomach.