Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
I am very, very happy for Alice Walker.
To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society.
I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees.
Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
Say what you have to say now! Don’t wait until you’re sending blips from the other side.
So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
What do we want from each other after we have told our stories.
For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world...
Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other.
And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else’s position but our own.
You will never be able to defend your city while shouting.
Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world.
How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?
We’re supposed to see “universal” love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.
Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.