There are no right answers to wrong questions.
To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.
To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.
We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?
You sit down and you do it, and you do it, and you do it, until you have learned to do it.
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.
I talk about the gods, I am an atheist. But I am an artist too, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth.
All makers must leave room for the acts of the spirit. But they have to work hard and carefully, and wait patiently, to deserve them.
To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.
Writing makes no noise, except groans, and it can be done everywhere, and it is done alone.
It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
What goes too long unchanged destroys itself.
The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can’t live on realism alone.
The model of modern Western civilization is the virus: the pure bit of information, which turns its environment into endless reproductions of itself.
Before the moon I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon.
Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.