I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch.
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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.
What we see, we see and seeing is changing.
If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
A language is a map of our failures.
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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 mere survival.
I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.