Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.

I cannot shut you out the way I shut the others out, so maybe I can destroy you. Must destroy you?

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Divide and conquer must become define and empower.