Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.

Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives.

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible.

How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?

Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill.