Great Throughts Treasury

"A precise, detached caliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter-moon in arrest."

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters"

"Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself."

"A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience."

"A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire."

"Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep."

"A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'?"

"Across the freeway stands another structure from the other side of the mirror it destroys the logical processes of the mind, a man's thoughts become completely disorganized, madness streaming from every throat frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls the steel trays, iron beds bolted to the wall, the smells, the human waste. To determine how men will behave once they enter prison it is of first importance to know that prison."

"All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman?s body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups, where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman."

"All new learning looks at first like chaos."

"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."

"And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten, his hand types out the details and he wants them all but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best."

"An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim."

"An honorable human relationship ? that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word love ? is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us."

"And yet, protest it if we will, some corner of the mind retains the medieval man, who still keeps watch upon those starry skeins and drives us out of doors at night to gaze at anagrams of light."

"Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate."

"Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth."

"Any woman's death diminishes me."

"As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts."

"Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage."

"Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do."

"At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever. At forty-five, I want to know even our limits. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die."

"As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son."

"As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry."

"As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning its government or by saying three times As a woman my country is the whole world."

"Because life is short and you too are thirsty."

"But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child?s mother or some man?s wife??we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself."

"But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds."

"Birds and periodic blood. Old recapitulations. The fox, panting, fire-eyed, gone to earth in my chest. How beautiful we are, he and I, with our auburn pelts, our trails of blood, our miracle escapes, our whiplash panic flogging us on to new miracles! They?ve supplied us with pills for bleeding, pills for panic. Wash them down the sink. This is truth, then: dull needle groping for the spinal fluid, weak acid in the bottom of the cup, foreboding, foreboding. No one tells the truth about truth, that it?s what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow: dull-jawed, onrushing killer, being that inanely single-minded will have our skins at last."

"But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival."

"Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?"

"But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat."

"But from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening."

"By dawn you were pure electric. You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in."

"Can you remember? When we thought the poets taught how to live?"

"Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again."

"Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination."

"Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live."

"Diving into the wreck: First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade ... And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here... the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters... 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."

"Driving the San Francisco?Oakland Bay Bridge no monument?s in sight but fog prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog no icon lifts a lamp here history?s breath blotting the air over Gold Mountain"

"Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own."

"Even before I wholly knew I was a lesbian, it was the lesbian in me who pursued that elusive configuration. And I believe it is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks literature that will express that energy and strength. It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman."

"Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome."

"Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole."

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

"Experience is always larger than language."

"False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. False history gets written every day... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own."

"Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognize that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective, nor value-free, nor inclusively human. Feminism implies that we recognize for us, the distortion, of male-created ideologies, and that we proceed to think, and act, out of that recognition."

"Final Notations: it will not be simple, it will not be long, it will take little time, it will take all your thought, it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath, it will be short, it will not be simple. It will touch you through your ribs, it will take all your heart, it will not be long, it will occupy your thought as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied, it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple. You are coming into us who cannot withstand you, you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you, you are taking parts of us into places never planned, you are going far away with pieces of our lives. It will be short, it will take all your breath, it will not be simple, it will become your will."

"First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. 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 stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass. 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."