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

A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.

It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

What i do in my personal time is about me. if other people dont agree, then it doesn’t matter ‘cos it’s my opinion and that’s what counts at the end of the day.

Don’t just count your days, make your days count.

Count your blessings. Every time I am doing bad I count my blessings. And I always lose count. Try that sometime.

I just need to count the rounds and count me money afterwards.

Don’t never drop your head. Don’t never feel like you counted out.

The day my children move out is years I can count on two hands I have them half this time years I count on one.

I Have been lost more times than I can count. But, oh, it is surely the times that I’ve been found that matter more.

But to mean it when I say that I want my life to count for His glory is to drive a stake through the heart of self – a painful and determined dying to me that must be a part of every day I live.