We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people’s minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.
The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
The point is to change one’s life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.
After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist – if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.
I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.
