“The dream police will not let me have sexual fantasies.”

I don’t think I know a single woman who knows what she looks like.

All our loves are contained in all our other loves.

Every house we have lived in, every building to which our hands have lent their work, belongs to us by virtue of love or of regret.

Unhappiness makes beggars or accountants of us all.

Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future.

[On Werner Erhard, founder of est:] If I wanted a new belief system, I’d choose to believe in God – He’s been in business longer than Werner, and He has better music.

All is waiting and all is work; all is change and all is permanence.

I made the mistake of thinking that if you add up the past, you sum up the future; I forgot how frequently life astonishes us.

One feels a quickening of the pulse when one crosses a border.

Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers.

One can be tired of Rome after three weeks and feel one has exhausted it; after three months one feels that one has not even scratched the surface of Rome; and after six months one wishes never to leave it.

To live exhilaratingly in and for the moment is deadly serious work, fun of the most exhausting sort

In the face of evil, detachment is a dubious virtue.

Italians do not regard food as merely fuel. They regard it as medicine for the soul, one of life’s abiding pleasures.

There are no inanimate objects.

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals — and critics of the Women’s Movement.

In my opinion, New York City police officers are brave.

Still, I wrote. Even when the police where coming. Even when my whole body hurt, and the slightest sound would make me quake.

I got in trouble with the police, and that was a rude awakening. That was it. I’d seen the bottom of the pit, and it was time to scrape myself out of it.

If the Saudis were culpable, they should be held accountable. If they had nothing to do with 9/11, they have nothing to fear.

There are those who believe justice and dignity are reserved only for some people. Young men have died in police custody, and the growing heel of poverty has worn down harder on children of color…We must fight back.

Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don’t tell them anything.

When poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color, color lines and colonies, somebody tells the police.

Just because I was at an anti-police brutality protest, doesn’t mean I’m anti-police. We want justice, but stop shooting unarmed people.