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.
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
Life on the planet is born of woman.
There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine.
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs...
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Strangers are an endangered species...
Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism...