Quote collection
253 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!"
"But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself."
"To do something very common, in my own way."
"I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch"
"We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both."
"Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture."
"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/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?"
"Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom."
"If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?"
"But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds."
"... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry."
"motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power."
"To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?"
"But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival."
"The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious."
"We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama."
"In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence."
"What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"
"I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them."
"Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself."