There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.