The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sen….

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . ..

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 prote….

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness..

There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not….

The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival..

I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use..

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?.

You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. but people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid tha….

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structure….

Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to ….

I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier ….

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury o….

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer..

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest..

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are exp….

One pays a lot, we all pay a lot, for awareness..

Part of the lesbian consciousness is an absolute recognition of the erotic within our lives and, taking that a step further, dealing with the erotic ….

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel ….

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house..

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is redis….