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

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

Without community, there is no liberation.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. ... pain will always either change or stop. Always. ... The confidence that it will change is what makes bearing it possible. So pain is fluid. It is only when you conceive of it as something static that it is unbearable.

Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.

From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.

Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.