I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

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

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.