I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.