You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Strangers are an endangered species.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

One line typed twenty years ago

can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint

to glorify art as detachment

or torture of those we

did not love but also

did not want to kill.

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.

When a woman tells the truth, she creates the possibility for more truth around her.

The faithful drudging child
the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,
hard work, style will win her prizes
becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes
but to change the laws of history.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.

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

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...?

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Whereever a poet is born enduring
depends on the frailest of chances:
Who listened to your murmuring
over your little rubbish who let you be
who gave you the books
who let you know you were not
alone.