"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors."

"Lying is done with words, and also with silence."

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work."

"You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it."

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

"I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons"

"I feel more helpless with you than without you".""

"No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city."

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

"Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves."

"If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up."

"It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple"

"My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world."

"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."

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

"I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them."

"No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors."

"...you look at me like an emergency"

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters that beak which grips her, she becomes."

"War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure."

"If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction a delta springing from the riverbed with its five fingers spread"

"The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth."

"Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep."

"I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings"

"The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life."

"Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness"

"When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever."

"The moment of change is the only poem."

"I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind."

"And I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other."

"Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know."

"These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know."

"Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls."

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters."

"If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end."

"For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see."

"What we see, we see and seeing is changing"

"To do something very common, in my own way."

"In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence."

"What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"

"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."

"I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch"

"Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail."

"There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity."

"You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you."

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

"It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry."

"But from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening -from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties"

"We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth."

"Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives."