“Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.”

The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.

It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.

What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.

Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.

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.