"I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings"

"The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life."

"Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness"

"When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever."

"The moment of change is the only poem."

"I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind."

"And I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other."

"Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know."

"These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know."

"Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls."

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters."

"If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end."

"For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see."

"What we see, we see and seeing is changing"

"To do something very common, in my own way."

"In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence."

"What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"

"There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected."

"I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch"

"Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail."

"There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity."

"You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you."

"I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes...are maps...I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail"

"It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry."

"But from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening -from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties"

"We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth."

"Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives."

"A language is a map of our failures"

"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events"

"The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness."

"If you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces."

"I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my pulse, loving and ordinary Send out your signals, hoist your dark scribbled flags but take my hand"

"Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude."

"- this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you'd still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me."

"We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege"

"Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language."

"We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear."

"No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love."

"The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities"

"She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence."

"I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed."

"Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process."

"I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well."

"This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain?"

"We must use what we have to invent what we desire."

"I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet."

"Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! There's not a sob in my chest. Dry hearted Peer Gynt I pare away, no hero, merely a cook."

"The thing I came for: [...] the thing itself and not the myth"

"In every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling"