Great Throughts Treasury

"The unconscious wants the truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth."

"Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality."

"Our history is the history of a majority of the species, yet the struggles of women for a “human” status have been relegated to footnotes to the sidelines. Above all, women’s relationships with women have been denied or neglected as a force in history."

"[Responsibility to yourself] means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others – parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children – that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons."

"Lying is done with words, and also with silence."

"Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes."

"Any artist faces the necessity to explore, by whatever means, human relationships ? which may or may not be perceived as political. But there are also, and always, the changing questions of the medium itself, the craft and its demands."

"Behind all art is an element of desire. ? Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art ? even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?"

"For what are we, anyway, at our best, but one small, persistent cluster in a greater ferment of human activity ? still and forever turning toward, tuned for, the possible, the unrealized and irrepressible design?"

"Capitalism presents itself as obedience to a law of nature, man?s ?natural? and overwhelming predisposition toward activity that is competitive, aggressive, and acquisitive. Where capitalism invokes freedom, it means the freedom of capital. Where, in any mainstream public discourse, is this self-referential monologue put to the question?"

"Even in conversation, here in North America, we who so eagerly unpack our most private concerns before strangers dread the imaginative space that silence might open between two people or within a group. Television, obviously, abhors such silence."

"In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives."

"In the vocabulary kidnapped from liberatory politics, no word has been so pimped as freedom."

"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. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are the forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us, against us and within us."

"If we are writers writing first of all from our own desire and need, if this is irresistible work for us, if in writing we experience certain kinds of power and freedom that may be unavailable to us in other ways ? surely it would follow that we would want to make that kind of forming, shaping, naming, telling, accessible for anyone who can use it. It would seem only natural for writers to care passionately about literacy, public education, public libraries, public opportunities in all the arts. But more: if we care about the freedom of the word, about language as a liberatory current, if we care about the imagination, we will care about economic justice. For the pull and suck of Capital?s project tend toward reducing, not expanding, overall human intelligence, wit, expressiveness, creative rebellion."

"Silence? can be fertilizing, it can bathe the imagination, it can, as in great open spaces ? I think of those plains stretching far below the Hopi mesas in Arizona ? be the nimbus of a way of life, a condition of vision. Such living silences are more and more endangered throughout the world, by commerce and appropriation."

"Our past is seeded in our present and is trying to become our future. These concerns engage me as a citizen, feeling daily in my relationships with my fellow citizens the effects of a system based in the accumulation of wealth ? the value against which all other values must justify themselves. We all feel these effects, almost namelessly, as we go about our individual lives? But these are also my concerns as a poet, as the practitioner of an ancient and severely tested art. In a society in such extreme pain, I think these are any writer?s, any artist?s, concerns: the unnamed harm to human relationships, the blockage of inquiry, the oblique contempt with which we are depicted to ourselves and to others, in prevailing image making; a malnourishment that extends from the body to the imagination itself. Capital vulgarizes and reduces complex relations to a banal iconography."

"One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves."

"The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious."

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

"The liar lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control."

"The lie is a short-cut through another?s personality."

"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."

"The possibility of life between us."

"The question always is there, ?What kind of a privilege is it just to be able to feel purely and simply happy?? But we can, and in spite of so much ? and in spite of so much knowledge. And, for me, there?s always this issue of private and public happiness."

"The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire."

"The survival of a great diversity of books? depends on diverse interests having the means to make such books available. It also means a non-elite but educated audience, a population who are literate, who read and talk to each other, who may be factory workers or bakers or bank tellers or paramedicals or plumbers or computer consultants or farmworkers, whose first language may be Croatian or Tagalog or Spanish or Vietnamese but who are given to critical thinking, who care about art, an intelligentsia beyond intellectual specialists."

"The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet?s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way ? certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins ? often terribly and fearfully ? in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?"

"This is why the effort to speak honestly is so important. Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler ? for the liar ? than it really is, or ought to be."

"To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth."

"There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no ?the truth,? ?a truth? ? truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet."

"Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze itself; it has to be created between people."

"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it?s a movement into evolution."

"We have become a pyramidic society of the omnivorously acquisitive few, an insecure, dwindling middle class, and a multiplying number of ill-served, throwaway citizens and workers [resulting in] a kind of public breakdown, with symptoms along a spectrum from acute self-involvement to extreme anxiety to individual and group violence."

"We take so much of the universe on trust. You tell me: ?In 1950 I lived on the north side of Beacon Street in Somerville.? You tell me: ?She and I were lovers, but for months now we have only been good friends.? You tell me: ?It is seventy degrees outside and the sun is shining.? Because I love you, because there is not even a question of lying between us, I take these accounts of the universe on trust: your address twenty-five years ago, your relationship with someone I know only by sight, this morning?s weather. I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you."

"When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her."

"When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them."

"When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness."

"Writing and teaching are kinds of work, and the relative creative freedom of the writer or teacher depends on the conditions of human labor overall and everywhere."

"Women have been driven mad, ?gaslighted,? for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other?s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other."

"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other."

"Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire."

"A cave of scars! Ancient, archaic wallpaper built up, layer on layer from the earliest, dream-white to yesterday's, a red-black scrawl a red mouth slowly closing."

"A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it."

"A dream of tenderness wrestles with all I know of history."

"A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough."

"A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do."

"A language is a map of our failures."

"A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ?words? masculine persuasive force? of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men."

"A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being."