“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”

Divide and conquer must become define and empower.

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn’t matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

You need to reach down and touch the thing that’s boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.

You cannot use someone else’s fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.

A choice of pains. That’s what living was all about.

I am still learning – how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

I am still learning – how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.

Oppression is as American as apple pie.

I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

Our visions begin with our desires.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.

Women are powerful and dangerous.

Love at first sight? I absolutely believe in it! You’ve got to keep the faith. Who doesn’t like the idea that you could see someone tomorrow and she could be the love of your life? It’s very romantic.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

There is a fearful splendor in absolute desolation.

The beauty, the poetry of the fear in their eyes. I didn’t mind going to jail for, what, five, six hours? It was absolutely worth it.

The life of a writer is absolute hell compared to the life of a businessman.

A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.

I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel absolutely worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that.

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.