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.

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

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.

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

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple