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

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

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

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

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.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?