Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

[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.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.