One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it….

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome..

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire..

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die..

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else brea….

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that ….

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture..

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected..

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men….

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributarie….

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you….

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious..

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside whi….

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons..

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other….

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; th….

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine.

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, im….

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful..

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations sho….

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling..