The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

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

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

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

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

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.

Strangers are an endangered species.