It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, to become a politics of asking women's questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women--not a chosen few--shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

Strangers are an endangered species.