... This is the paradox of vision: Sharp perception softens our existence in the world.

Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal. Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

In my lifetime I have seen democracy begin to expand, not only to include those who have been excluded, but to provide a listening arena, a vocabulary, an intelligent reception for stories that have been buried. Not just stories of the disenfranchised and the marginalized, but marginalized and disenfranchised histories even in the lives of the accepted and the privileged.

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

Waging war is not a primary physical need.