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

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.

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

A man was defined not by his flaws, but by how he overcame them.

Goals, on the other hand, are specific things you have decided you need to accomplish within a clearly defined period of time.

A mission could be defined as an image of a desired state that you want to get to. Once fully seen, it will inspire you to act, fuel your imagination and determine your behavior.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

You don’t need to be defined by your job.

Credibility’ is defined as the willingness to kill a lot of people now for a not very good cause to assure the world that we’ll kill a lot more people if we can find a better one.

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

Philosophy may be defined as the art of asking the right question…awareness of the problem outlives all solutions.