Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

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

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

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.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

The password is a flicker of an eyelash.