Language matters because whoever controls the words controls the conversation, because whoever controls the conversation controls its outcome, because whoever frames the debate has already won it, because telling the truth has become harder and harder to achieve in an America drowning in Orwellian Newspeak.

what was time but a convention, a habit of mind, a custom of dress?

The trick is not how much pain you feel - but how much joy you feel

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.

Loving someone is a loss of freedom - but one doesn't think of it as loss because one gains so much else.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

I had been a feminist all my life, but the big problem was how to make your feminism jibe with you unappeasable hunger for male bodies.