The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

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.

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

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.