“The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.”

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.

Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.

Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.

For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

For a woman, le smoking is an indispensable garment with which she finds herself continually in fashion, because it is about style, not fashion.

The University of Cambridge, in accordance with that law of its evolution, by which, while maintaining the strictest continuity between the successive phases of its history, it adapts itself with more or less promptness to the requirements of the times, has lately instituted a course of Experimental Physics.

If you live in Europe . . . things change . . . but continuity never seems to break. You don’t have to throw the past away.

I write these shows one joke at a time. There’s no continuity. I do try to figure an order to the stories, but there’s not continuity.

Indirectly modifying the whole surface of the earth, breaking in upon any supposition of zoological continuity, and utterly unaccounted for by what we have any right to call the laws of nature.