There are lesbians, God knows... if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York... who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence.

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive

When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.