“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”

A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.

In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Only where there is language is there world.

Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we’re talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

The delusions of the past seem fond and foolish. The delusions of the present seem subtle and sane.

As long as men will not be freed from their errors and delusions, humanity will not be able to go towards (“marcher vers”, Fr.) the accomplishment of its true destinies.

The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

RATIONAL, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.

All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher.

What is man? He’s just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur.