“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.

The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.

To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.

It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

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.

I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.

The man who knows it can’t be done counts the risk, not the reward.

It is love alone that counts.

Cheerful givers do not count the cost of what they give.

Frequently remind yourself that God is with you, that He will never fail you, that you can count upon him. Say these words, “God is with me, helping me.”

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love—then make that day count!

Each and every bad seed counts, for even if they don’t survive or grow too beautifully, a bad seed allows you to re-evalutate the others and appreciate them even more.

Getting 1 percent better every day counts for a lot in the long-run.

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.