A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

Life on the planet is born of woman.