52 quotes
Doorways are sacred to women for we
are the doorways of life and we must choose
what comes in and what goes out.
fragment of poem in Moon Is Always Female (1980)
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
Each good novel has a vision of its world that informs what is put in and what is left out.
Life of Prose and Poetry — An Inspiring Combination (1999)
Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break.
Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1973)
If you have contempt for people and think they cannot know what they want and need, who the hell is the revolution for?
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
The Movement is supposed to be for human liberation: how come the condition of women inside it is no better than outside?
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
Utopia is work that issues from pain: it is what we do not have that we crave.
My Life, My Body (2015)
Who wants equality? Those who do not have it.
My Life, My Body (2015)
If the rewards are concentrated at the top, the shitwork is concentrated at the bottom.
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
A tendency to believe quite literally in the rhetoric of Movement males is a form of naiveté that no woman can afford.
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
For me the gifts of the novelist are empathy and imagination.
Life of Prose and Poetry — An Inspiring Combination (1999)
There are a lot of lonely and a lot of horny women.
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
I think poetry ultimately is a more communal activity than fiction, but I love both equally.
Life of Prose and Poetry — An Inspiring Combination (1999)
Good work in a field breeds interest and makes room for more good practitioners. We are not rivals but workers building something whose final shape we are not able even to fantasize.
Introduction to Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now (1987)
The importance of male solidarity to enforce discrimination and contempt for women cannot be overemphasized.
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
The use of women as props for a sagging ego is accepted socially. Everybody sees it and everybody agrees that they don't.
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third. (p666)
Gone to Soldiers (1987)
The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it.
Woman on the Edge of Time, 40 years on" Article (2016)
We are oppressed, and we will achieve our liberation by fighting for it the same as any other oppressed group. Nobody is going to give it to us because we ask, however eloquently.
The Grand Coolie Damn (1969)
At that time, a pregnant woman could not get an abortion in Massachusetts -- but a cat could. (p221)
Sleeping with Cats (2001)