“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.”

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.

I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.

You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

My mother’s sister was killed in a trolley car accident, so I was raised as one of eight with my sister and six male cousins.

I wish they were like the White Rhinosix of them left in the Serengeti National Park, and all males.

I’m male gigolo. Professionally? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything professionally.

if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

Pakistani feature films are all about catering to the male ego and male fantasy.

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.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.