“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.”

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

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

I like to do the pictures before people get too self-conscious. I like to be spontaneous and get a shot before the subject thinks too much about it.

Once the light of our awareness is cast on any darkness, then it cannot hide and it cannot remain. Such is the law of consciousness.

It is your soul’s journey to enroll the ego in the quest for the ultimate victory – the evolution of your own individual consciousness.

People are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.

To experience relationships of substance and depth requires approaching and entering into relationships with consciousness and concern for the other.

Whenever a woman would come too close, I would cut her off. Part of that was vindictive – but that was totally subconscious.

Are you fully conscious of your worth? Are you a person or a universe?

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.