“To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.”

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.

In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Only where there is language is there world.

Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

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

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.

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.

We ought to be living as if Jesus died yesterday, rose this morning, and is coming back this afternoon.

There’s never a better way of living than just improving our quality of life.

It is the skeleton of truth, to be clothed and rounded out by the living graces of a holy life.

So it is the great end of Christian living to transmute the light of truth into the fruits of holy living.

He is far superior to any now living, and would doubtless have beaten Labourdonnais himself.

Consistently making that best choice will add up to living your best life. Your health is the key to that.

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

Red lips like a living, laughing rose.