“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.”

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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.