But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
We have lived with violence far too long.
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.
The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope? – You yourself must change it.
To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery...
Any woman’s death diminishes me.
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.