Depression is useful. It signals that you need to make changes in your life, it challenges your tendency to withdraw, it reminds you to take action.

Living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an "alien" element.

All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.

Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.

I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails.

I can't seem to stay out of my own way.

We cannot educate white women and take them by the hand. Most of us are willing to help but we can't do the white woman's homework for her. That's an energy drain. More times than she cares to remember, Nellie Wong, Asian American feminist writer, has been called by white women wanting a list of Asian American women who can give readings or workshops. We are in danger of being reduced to purvey­ors of resource lists.