Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .
Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded...
It’s possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we’ll make it.
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
Women are powerful and dangerous.
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.
I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.
Silence has never brought us anything of worth.
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.