No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

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

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

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