A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Human beings have an inalienable right to invent themselves.
Above all, for his merciless, contemptuous treatment of Clifford Chatterley, blown to bits in Flanders in 1918, Lawrence can be damned to hell. Damned but not banned.
I got him’ is nonsense in terms of love relationships, and so is ‘I lost him’. If we could stop thinking in terms of capture, we would not have to fear the loosening of the captives’ bonds and our failing beauty, and he would not have ulcers about being outsrtipped or belittled.
Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark.
Every woman knows that, regardless of all her other achievements, she is a failure if she is not beautiful.
Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.
Human beings have an unalienable right to invent themselves; when that right is pre-empted it is called brain-washing.
Women live lives of continual apology. They are born and raised to take the blame for other people’s behavior. If they are treated without respect, they tell themselves that they have failed to earn respect. If their husbands do not fancy them, it is because they are unattractive.
The pain of sexual frustration, of repressed tenderness, of denied curiosity, of isolation in the ego, of greed, suppressed rebellion, of hatred poisoning all love and generosity, permeates our sexuality. What we love we destroy.
There are poems about the internet and about the shipping forecast but very few by women celebrating men.
Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.
The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
Poetry exists partly to undermine the certainties of an accepted intellectual system, by opening a fissure of awareness at which the reality of the unconquered world may enter.
In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband’s fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.
Psychoanalysis is the confession without absolution.
The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.
Gender reassignment is an exorcism of the mother.