One can find traces of every life in each life.

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

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.

Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us.

I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.

And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual (male), it may be mainly a quantitative difference.

Far more frightening than the thought of dying was the experience of erasure already occurring in my life. My fear of becoming someone who did not count.