We might possess every technological resource . . . but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary”...

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to...

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the...

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

We lie under the sheetafter making love, speakingof lonelinessrelieved in a bookrelived in a bookso on that pagethe clot and fissureof it appearswords of a manin paina naked wordentering the clota hand graspingthrough bars:deliveranceWhat happens...

Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither...

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent...

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood....

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as...

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

Open Air Museum. Seen from a train, stopped / As by design, to bring us / Face to face with the flag of our true country: / Violet-yellow, black-violet, / Its heart sucked by slow...

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we...

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes...

…you look at me like an emergency

A language is a map of our failures

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with...

Vous travaillez pour l’armee, madame?’ (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the...

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in...

It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from “Splittings

The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking...

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her...

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

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and...

Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the...

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so...

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men. The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

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

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male “fear of women” and of women’s sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men...

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.