Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

... 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.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

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

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.