The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.

I am a bleak heroism of words that refuse to be buried alive with the liars.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

… our sons must become men – such men as we hope our daughters, born and unborn, will be pleased to live among. Our sons will not grow into women. Their way is more difficult than that of our daughters, for they must move away from us, without us. Hopefully ours have what they have learned from us, and a howness to forge into their own image.

So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.