Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I learned so much from listening to people. And all I knew was, the only thing I had was honesty and openness.
...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.
If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.
If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive
We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.
We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face?
I am a post-mastectomy woman who believes our feelings need voice in order to be recognized, respected, and of use.
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.
Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain.
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.
The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
We recognize that all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives
Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips
It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries.
The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.
Art is not living. It is the use of living. The artist has the ability to take the living and use it in a certain way and produce art.
When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.
Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever.
Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.
In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.
For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing.
We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage.
We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature.
The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . .
There is a timbre of voice that comes from not being heard and knowing / you are not being heard / noticed only by others / not heard for the same reason.
I was going to die, if not sooner, then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.
Some women wait for themselves around the next corner and call the empty spot peace but the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care.
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
There are many lesbians and gay men trapped by their fear into silence and invisibility, and they exist in a dim valley of terror wearing nooses of conformity.
I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side
Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.