The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

When you have a peace movement that has an actual war, it's different from one that has wars that our country is not totally involved in. During the war in Vietnam, and to a lesser degree the wars in Central America where our country was directly involved, it was easier to organize.

Sometimes before people know what they're saying, they already love the language.

If you're feminist, it means that you've noticed that male ownership of the direction of female lives has been the order of the day for a few thousand years, and it isn't natural.

No metaphor reinvents the job of the nurture of children except to muddy or mock.

I liked the education. I liked people learning things all around me and I liked going to people's classes.

When you think of things that influenced your life, Mother Goose influenced more people than almost any other thing, the rhythms of those poems. Everything after that was a bare imitation of some of those mysterious and materialistic poems.