We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love.

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .

When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining - I'm broadening the joining.

Without community, there is no liberation.

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.