…unity does not mean unanimity—

We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves.

We lose our history so easily…Maybe because we do not listen to our poets or to our fools, maybe because we do not listen to our mamas in ourselves.

Sometimes we could not bear the face of each other's differences because of what we feared those differences might say about ourselves.

If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you:

everything can be used

except what is wasteful

(you will need

to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.

In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretence that these differences do not exist.

And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

…to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.

…the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which canbe the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt…

I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience…

We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.