“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you.”
“When a woman tells the truth, she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”
“Lying is done with words and also with silence.”
“Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
“A wild patience has taken me this far.”
“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”
“Power, properly understood, is the capacity to achieve purpose.”
“The moment of change is the only poem.”
“This is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you.”
“Our wounds are the openings into the best and most beautiful part of us.”
“The most important thing one can do for children is not to shelter them from challenges but to teach them how to meet challenges.”
“The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.”
“Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people.”
“We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
“Feminism means finally admitting that we do not know what we are doing here, together on this planet.”
“Where there is silence, there is power.”
“Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word.”
“The connections between our lives and the lives of others have to be found, not imposed.”
“The act of making poetry is a form of political rebellion.”
“The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy.”
“To love is to be in a state of grace.”
“The hardest task is to live out in reality what you have written on paper.”
“Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence.”
“Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. It is a political act.”
“We can’t create a fantasy of some golden era when women were all-powerful and happy.”
“Life on the planet is born of woman.”
“Women have been driven mad, ‘gaslighted,’ for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts.”
“The freedom to write is essential to the inquiring mind and to the free exchange of ideas.”
“Writing is renaming.”
“Language is power, life and the instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation.”
“Feminism is the politics of naming; it is the refusal to let the world dictate who you are.”
“The place where we meet and connect with others is the only place worth being.”
“The material world is also the world of spirit.”
“To be a feminist is to refuse to participate in the self-deception of the culture.”
“An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’—is a process.”
“We must risk the self we have for the self we want to become.”
“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”
“The history of our oppression is the history of our silence.”
“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.”
“The world can only be saved by taking risks.”
“Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo.”
“The only poetry is revolutionary poetry.”
“Justice is the act of refusing to accept the oppression of others.”
“The courage to live the truth of who you are is the greatest courage of all.”
“The poet becomes an agent of transformation, a conduit for new ways of seeing and being.”
“To write is to protest against the void, to make life real.”