we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.

Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.

But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.

Remember you live in a community. You have a responsibility to be accountable to your family and your community as well as yourself.

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

The passage is through, not over, not by, not around but through.

Our strategy is how we cope--how we measure and weigh what is to be said and when, what is to be done and how, and to whom and towhom and to whom, daily deciding/risking who it is we can call an ally, call a friend (whatever that person's skin, sex or sexuality). We are women without a line. We are women who contradict each other.