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.
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
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.
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
To do something very common, in my own way.
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.