The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.

Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.

Anger is loaded with information and energy.

Afraid is a country with no exit visas.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury")

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.