War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.