In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.

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.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

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

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

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.

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.