Quote collection
253 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative."
"I feel more helpless with you than without you."
"There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity."
"When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing."
"In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash."
"It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, to become a politics of asking women's questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women--not a chosen few--shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture."
"Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence"
"It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism."
"In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination."
"The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell."
"You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry."
"I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings"
"A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do."
"They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?"
"Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth."
"The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life."
"All new learning looks at first like chaos."
"The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth."
"You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it."
"In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture."