"The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness."

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

"A language is a map of our failures"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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"

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters."

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

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

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

"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."