Quote collection
253 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation."
"No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness."
"The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle."
"I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?"
"The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind."
"Marriage is lonelier than solitude."
"Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine"
"I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud."
"No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city."
"I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary."
"Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude."
"... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias."
"Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?"
"Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own."
"[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival."
"We have lived with violence far too long."
"Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival."
"A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it."
"Reality, the oppressor's tongue."
"The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."