Poets from New York City

"Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it."

"I endeavor To hold the I as one only for the cloud Of which I am a fragment, yet to which I'm vowed To be responsible. Its light against my face Reveals the witness of the stars, each in its place Singing, each compassed by the rest, The many joined to one, the mightiest to the least. It is so great a thing to be an infinitesimal part of this immeasurable orchestra the music bursts the heart, And from this tiny plosion all the fragments join: Joy orders the disunity until the song is one."

"All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones."

"We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes…"

"Poetry, at least the kind I write, is written out of immediate need; it is written out of pain, joy, and experience too great to be borne until it is ordered into words. And then it is written to be shared."

"The first people a dictator puts in jail after a coup are the writers, the teachers, the librarians — because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people."

"Speaking of ways, pet, by the way, there is such a thing as a tesseract."

"Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist."

"Suddenly there was a great burst of light through the Darkness. The light spread out and where it touched the Darkness the Darkness disappeared. The light spread until the patch of Dark Thing had vanished, and there was only a gentle shining, and through the shining came the stars, clear and pure."

"As the skipping rope hit the pavement, so did the ball. As the rope curved over the head of the jumping child, the child with the ball caught the ball. Down came the ropes. Down came the balls. Over and over again. Up. Down. All in rhythm. All identical. Like the houses. Like the paths. Like the flowers"

"You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

"Alike and Equal are not the same."

"Hate was nothing that IT didn't have. IT knew all about hate."

"Suddenly she knew. She knew! Love. That was what she had that IT did not have. She had Mrs. Whatsit's love, and her father's, and mother's, and the real Charles Wallace's love, and the twins', and Aunt Beast's. And she had her love for them. But how could she use it? What was she meant to do?"

"Because of the very nature of the world as it is today our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe, that we can help our children avoid by providing them with “explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.” So how do we do it? We can’t just sit down at our typewriters an turn out explosive material. I took a course in college on Chaucer, one of the most explosive, imaginative, and far-reaching in influence of all writers. And I’ll never forget going to the final exam and being asked why Chaucer used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote in a white heat of fury, “I don’t think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these thing. That isn’t the way people write.” I believe this as strongly now as I did then. Most of what is best in writing isn’t done deliberately."

"I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others. A writer of fantasy, fairly tale, or myth must inevitably discover that he is not writing out of his own knowledge or experience, but out of something both deeper and wider. I think that fantasy must possess the author and simply use him. I know that this is true of A Wrinkle in Time. I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it. It was simply a book I had to write. I had no choice. And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant. Very few children have any problem with the world of the imagination; it’s their own world, the world of their daily life, and it’s our loss that so many of us grow out of it."

"What a child doesn’t realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairly tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture. Many … books are from this realm… books on Hindu myth, Chinese folklore, the life of Buddha, tales of American Indians, books that lead our children beyond all boundaries and into the one language of all mankind. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth... The extraordinary, the marvelous thing about Genesis is not how unscientific it is, but how amazingly accurate it is. How could the ancient Israelites have known the exact order of an evolution that wasn’t to be formulated for thousands of years? Here is a truth that cuts across barriers of time and space."

"A book, too, can be a star, “explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly,” a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."

"The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself. He has thrown himself completely into whatever it is he is doing. A child playing a game, building a sand castle, painting a picture, is completely in what he is doing. His self-consciousness is gone; his consciousness is wholly focused outside himself."

"When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we escape our self-conscious selves."

"The medieval mystics say the true image and the true real met once and for all on the cross: once and for all: and yet they still meet daily."

"My husband is my most ruthless critic. … Sometimes he will say, "It's been said better before." Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die."

"Here we are living in a world of "identity crises," and most of us have no idea what an identity is. Half the problem is that an identity is something which must be understood intuitively, rather than in terms of provable fact. An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy."

"We do have to use our minds as far as they will take us, yet acknowledging that they cannot take us all the way. We can give a child a self-image. But is this a good idea? Hitler did a devastating job at that kind of thing. So does Chairman Mao. … I haven't defined a self, nor do I want to. A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming."

"I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what."

"The rational intellect doesn't have a great deal to do with love, and it doesn't have a great deal to do with art. I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the "superconscious" has already shown me in a story or poem."

"It is all, as usual, paradox. I have to use what intellect I have in order to write books, but I write the kind of books I do in order that I may try to set down glimpses of things that are on the other side of the intellect. We do not go around and discard the intellect, but we must go through and beyond it."

"How do we teach a child — our own, or those in a classroom — to have compassion: to allow people to be different; to understand that like is not equal; to experiment; to laugh; to love; to accept the fact that the most important questions a human being can ask do not have — or need — answers."

"Love can't be pinned down by a definition, and it certainly can't be proved, anymore than anything else important in life can be proved."

"When a child who has been conceived in love is born to a man and a woman, the joy of that birth sings throughout the universe. The joy of writing or painting is much the same, and the insemination comes not from the artist himself but from his relationship with those he loves, with the whole world. All real art is, in its true sense, religious; it is a religious impulse; there is not such thing as a non-religious subject."

"Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means."

"We do live, all of us, on many different levels, and for most artists the world of imagination is more real than the world of the kitchen sink."

"It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God."

"Nothing important is completely explicable."

"The uncommon man has done the impossible and there has been that much more light in the world because of it. Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves."

"St. John said, "And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not." The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not understand it, and cannot extinguish it ( I need the double meaning here of comprehend). This is the great cry of affirmation that is heard over and over again in our imaginative literature, in all art. It is a light to lighten our darkness, to guide us, and we do not need to know, in the realm of provable fact, exactly where it is going to take us."

""Why do you write for children?" My immediate response to this question is, "I don't." ... If it's not good enough for adults, it's not good enough for children. If a book that is going to be marketed for children does not interest me, a grownup, then I am dishonoring the children for whom the book is intended, and I am dishonoring books. And words. Sometimes I answer that if I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children. This is usually good for a slightly startled laugh, but it's perfectly true. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth. It was adults who thought that children would be afraid of the Dark Thing in Wrinkle, not children, who understand the need to see thingness, non-ness, and to fight it."

"A great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is. It is a vehicle of truth, but it is not a blueprint, and we tend to confuse the two."

"What can we give a child when there is nothing left? All we have, I think, is the truth, the truth that will set him free, not limited, provable truth, but the open, growing, evolving truth that is not afraid."

"I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers. I don't need to know the difference between a children's book and an adult one; it's the questions that have come from thinking about it that are important. I wish we'd stop finding answers for everything. One of the reasons my generation has mucked up the world to such an extent is our loss of the sense of the mysterious."

"I wrote, after an early rejection, "X turned down Wrinkle, turned it down with one hand while saying that he loved it, but didn't quite dare to do it, as it really isn't classifiable. I know it isn't really classifiable, and am wondering if i'll have to go through the usual hell with this that I seem to go through with everything I write. But this book I'm sure of. If I've ever written a book that says how I feel about God and the universe, this is it. This is my psalm of praise..."

"All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs."

"Chronology, the time which changes things, makes them grow older, wears them out, and manages to dispose of them, chronologically, forever. Thank God there is kairos too: again the Greeks were wiser than we are. They had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Kairos is not measurable. Kairos is ontological. In kairos we are, we are fully in isness, not negatively, as Sartre saw the isness of the oak tree, but fully, wholly, positively. Kairos can sometimes enter, penetrate, break through chronos: the child at play, the painter at his easel, Serkin playing the Appassionata are in kairos. The saint in prayer, friends around the dinner table, the mother reaching out her arms for her newborn baby are in kairos. The bush, the burning bush, is in kairos, not any burning bush, but the particular burning bush before which Moses removed his shoes; the bush I pass by on my way to the brook. In kairos that part of us which is not consumed in the burning is wholly awake."

"Gregory of Nyssa points out that Moses's vision of God began with the light, with the visible burning bush, the bush which was bright with fire and was not consumed; but afterwards, God spoke to him in a cloud. After the glory which could be seen with human eyes, he began to see the glory which is beyond and after light. The shadows are deepening all around us. Now is the time when we must begin to see our world and ourselves in a different way."

"My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and. . . . For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology."

"We rebel against the impossible. I sense a wish in some professional religion-mongers to make God possible, to make him comprehensible to the naked intellect, domesticate him so that he's easy to believe in. Every century the Church makes a fresh attempt to make Christianity acceptable. But an acceptable Christianity is not Christian; a comprehensible God is no more than an idol."

"If we commit ourselves to one person for life this is not, as many people think, a rejection of freedom; rather, it demands the courage to move into all the risks of freedom, and the risk of love which is permanent; into that love which is not possession but participation."

"When a promise is broken, the promise still remains. In one way or another, we are all unfaithful to each other, and physical unfaithfulness is not the worst kind there is."

"If our love for each other really is participatory, then all other human relationships nourish it; it is inclusive, never exclusive. If a friendship makes me love Hugh more, then I can trust that friendship. If it thrusts itself between us, then it should be cut out, and quickly."

"No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed."

"My young friend who was taught that she was so sinful the only way an angry God could be persuaded to forgive her was by Jesus dying for her, was also taught that part of the joy of the blessed in heaven is watching the torture of the damned in hell. A strange idea of joy. But it is a belief limited not only to the more rigid sects. I know a number of highly sensitive and intelligent people in my own communion who consider as a heresy my faith that God's loving concern for his creation will outlast all our willfulness and pride. No matter how many eons it takes, he will not rest until all of creation, including Satan, is reconciled to him, until there is no creature who cannot return his look of love with a joyful response of love... Origen held this belief and was ultimately pronounced a heretic. Gregory of Nyssa, affirming the same loving God, was made a saint. Some people feel it to be heresy because it appears to deny man his freedom to refuse to love God. But this, it seems to me, denies God his freedom to go on loving us beyond all our willfulness and pride. If the Word of God is the light of the world, and this light cannot be put out, ultimately it will brighten all the dark corners of our hearts and we will be able to see, and seeing, will be given the grace to respond with love — and of our own free will."

"I cannot believe that God wants punishment to go on interminably any more than does a loving parent. The entire purpose of loving punishment is to teach, and it lasts only as long as is needed for the lesson. And the lesson is always love."

"If our usual response to an annoying situation is a curse, we're likely to meet emergencies with a curse. In the little events of daily living we have the opportunity to condition our reflexes, which are built up out of ordinary things. And we learn to bless first of all by being blessed. My reflexes of blessing have been conditioned by my parents, my husband, my children, my friends"

"I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work. I have never served a work as I would like to, but I do try, with each book, to serve to the best of my ability, and this attempt at serving is the greatest privilege and the greatest joy that I know."

"One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love. And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned."

"One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof."

"It has often struck me with awe that some of the most deeply religious people I know have been, on the surface, atheists."

"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability."

"Maybe you have to know darkness before you can appreciate the light."

"The truth of a story is what the novelist strives for, and quite often the writer is taken down strange and unexpected paths on this search."

"Faith is for the part of the story that superficially isn’t believable."

"We are not to retreat from life, pinning our hopes on ‘elsewhere.’ but to know that we will come to that final destination best by living full here and now, be it through joy, or pain, or a mix of both."

"Life is full of questions, and we are free to ask them, to understand, occasionally, that we are not going to get an answer, or at least not the answer we expect, and then we are called to move on. But I believe that God encourages us to ask questions."

"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."

"In Kenneth Grahame's beautiful book, The Wind In The Willows, Mole and Rat go to the holy island of the great god, Pan. It is a superb piece of religious writing, but because it has gone beyond fact, it is deeply upsetting and untruthful to some people. If a story is not specified as being Christian, it is not Christian. But that is not so. I think that this scene is upsetting because it calls us beyond fact into the vast world of imagination, and imagination is a word of many dimensions."

"A while ago there was an article in the New York Times about some women in Tennessee who wanted the middle grade text books removed from the school curriculum, not because they were inadequate educationally, but because these women were afraid that they might stimulate the childrens' imaginations. What!?! It was a good while later that I realized that the word, imagination, is always a bad word in the King James translation of the Bible. I checked it out in my concordance, and it is always bad. Put them down in the imagination of their hearts. Their imagination is only to do evil. Language changes. What meant one thing three hundred years ago means something quite different now. So the people who are afraid of the word imagination are thinking about it as it was defined three centuries ago, and not as it is understood today, a wonderful word denoting creativity and wideness of vision. Another example of our changing language is the word, prevent. Take it apart into its Latin origin, and it is prevenire. Go before. So in the language of the King James translation if we read, "May God prevent us," we should understand the meaning to be, "God go before us," or "God lead us." And the verb, to let, used to mean, stop. Do not let me, meant do not stop me. And now it is completely reversed into a positive, permissive word."

"Language is often changed by writers. We speak English today because Chaucer chose to write in the language of the common people, rather than the Latin or French used by those who were educated. James Joyce had an almost equally profound effect on language when he wrote about the inner self, rather than the outer self."

"I don't want to dump on TV, but there's no doubt that our language has been changed by television, especially by the media, which tries to manipulate us into being consumers. Most of the time nowadays we human beings are referred to as consumers. What does the consumer think? What does the consumer want? How ugly. Forest fires consume. Cancer consumes. I want us to be nourishers. To be a librarian, particularly a librarian for young adults, is to be a nourisher, to share stories, offer books full of new ideas. We live in a world which has changed radically in the last half century, and story helps us to understand and live creatively with change. The changes are not going to stop. They are going to continue and accelerate. Like it or not."

"One day back in the fifties my father and I were watching a program on our black and white TV which included an interview with an elderly man who answered one question by remarking, "Just because there's snow on the roof doesn't mean the fire's gone out in the furnace." The screen went black as the program went off the air, and we heard the announcer say, "There will be a brief interlude of organ music." Certainly that mild quip of the elderly man wouldn't shock anybody today. We might laugh appreciatively at his wit, but that would be the extent of our reaction. The change in point of view has been equally radical in the world of books. Somehow or other I've never gotten around to reading Lady Chatterly's Lover, but I doubt if it would shock me."

"I've always believed that there is no subject that is taboo for the writer. It is how it is written that makes a book acceptable, as a work of art, or unacceptable and pornographic. There are many books circulating today, for the teen-ager as well as the grown up, which would not have been printed in the fifties. It is still amazing to me that A Wrinkle In Time was considered too difficult for children. My children were seven, ten, and twelve while I was writing it, and they understood it. The problem is not that it's too difficult for children, but that it's too difficult for grown ups. Much of the world view of Einstein's thinking wasn't being taught when the grown ups were in school, but the children were comfortably familiar with it."

"Wrinkle, when it was finally published in 1962, after two years of rejections, broke several current taboos. The protagonist was female, and one of the unwritten rules of science fiction was that the protagonist should be male. I'm a female. Why would I give all the best ideas to a male? Another assumption was that science and fantasy don't mix. Why not? We live in a fantastic universe, and subatomic particles and quantum mechanics are even more fantastic than the macrocosm. Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth. During the fifties Erich Fromm published a book called The Forgotten Language, in which he said that the only universal language which breaks across barriers of race, culture, time, is the language of fairy tale, fantasy, myth, parable, and that is why the same stories have been around in one form or another for hundreds of years. Someone said, "It's all been done before." Yes, I agreed, but we all have to say it in our own voice."

"I wrote because I wanted to know what everything was about. My father, before I was born, had been gassed in the first World War, and I wanted to know why there were wars, why people hurt each other, why we couldn't get along together, and what made people tick. That's why I started to write stories."

"There's more to life than just the things that can be explained by encyclopedias and facts. Facts alone are not adequate."

"I really enjoy good murder mystery writers, usually women, frequently English, because they have a sense of what the human soul is about and why people do dark and terrible things. I also read quite a lot in the area of particle physics and quantum mechanics, because this is theology. This is about the nature of being. This is what life is all about. I try to read as widely as I possibly can."

"I wrote A Wrinkle in Time when we were living in a small dairy farm village in New England. I had three small children to raise, and life was not easy. We lost four of our closest friends within two years by death — that's a lot of death statistically. And I really wasn't finding the answers to my big questions in the logical places. So, at the time I discovered the world of particle physics. I discovered Einstein and relativity. I read a book of Einstein's, in which he said that anyone who's not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle. And I thought, "Oh, I've found my theologian, what a wonderful thing.""

"A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can't name a major publisher who didn't reject it. And there were many reasons. One was that it was supposedly too hard for children. Well, my children were 7, 10, and 12 while I was writing it. I'd read to them at night what I'd written during the day, and they'd say, "Ooh, mother, go back to the typewriter!" A Wrinkle in Time had a female protagonist in a science fiction book, and that wasn't done. And it dealt with evil and things that you don't find, or didn't at that time, in children's books. When we'd run through forty-odd publishers, my agent sent it back. We gave up. Then my mother was visiting for Christmas, and I gave her a tea party for some of her old friends. One of them happened to belong to a small writing group run by John Farrar, of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which at that time did not have a juvenile list. She insisted that I meet John any how, and I went down with my battered manuscript. John had read my first novel and liked it, and read this book and loved it. That's how it happened."

"Kids don't hesitate to ask questions. And it's a great honor to have the kids say, "Your books have made me trust you.""

"I have advice for people who want to write. I don't care whether they're 5 or 500. There are three things that are important: First, if you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write."

"I sometimes think God is a s--t — and he wouldn't be worth it otherwise. He's much more interesting when he's a s--t."

"It takes a lot of intellect to have faith, which is why so many people only have religiosity.... I'm against people taking the Bible absolutely literally, rather than letting some of it be real fantasy, like Jonah... Faith is best expressed in story."

"Henneberger: If the Bible is not literally true, does that mean we don’t need to take it seriously? L'Engle: Oh no, you do, because it’s truth, not fact, and you have to take truth seriously even when it expands beyond the facts."

"Jennifer Lee, who wrote, and co-directed Frozen with Chris Buck, has chosen her next project: A Wrinkle in Time. Lee will write the bigscreen adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book for Disney in which children travel through time and visit strange worlds in order to find their missing scientist father. Published in 1962, “Wrinkle in Time” was one of Lee’s favorite novels as a child, and she impressed Disney executives with her take on the project, which emphasizes a strong female-driven narrative and creatively approaches the science fiction and world-building elements of the book."

"Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules."

"I love what the poet Marvin Bell has suggested about writing-Read something, then write something. Read something else, then write something else. It's all connected, it's always been connected. Let one activity inform the other. Streams of language exchanging their powers."

"Life is a mystery as deep as ever death can be; Yet oh, how dear it is to us, this life we live and see!"

"But I believe that God is overhead; And as life is to the living, so death is to the dead."

"For ever and ever, my darling, yes— Goodness and love are undying; Only the troubles and cares of earth Are winged from the first for flying. Our way we plough In the furrow "now;" But after the tilling and growing the sheaf; Soil for the root, but the sun for the leaf— And God keepeth watch forever."

"Whenever a snow-flake leaves the sky, It turns and turns to say "Good-bye! Good-by, dear cloud, so cool and gray!" Then lightly travels on its way."

"But when a snow-flake, brave and meek, Lights on a rosy maiden's cheek, It starts—"How warm and soft the day!" "'Tis summer!" and it melts away."

""Learn while you're young," he often said, "There is much to enjoy, down here below; Life for the living, and rest for the dead!" Said the jolly old pedagogue, long ago."

"The living need charity more than the dead."

"tire swift swept front ly and lie and lane against"

"she had then could cram had by she am"

"The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. [...] Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off."

"As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People. The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really.""

"Poetry will never win the war on terror But neither will error abetted by error We girly men are not afraid Of uncertainty or reason or interdependence We think before we fight, then think some more Proclaim our faith in listening, in art, in compromise So be a girly man & sing this gurly song Sissies & proud That we would never lie our way to war"

"Not for all the fire in hell Not for all the blue in the sky Not for an empire of my own Not even for peace of mind"

"I was also looking for poems that didn't simply reproduce familiar versions of "difference" and "identity." I agree with Charles Bernstein, poet-critic and exponent of L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poetry, when he remarks in A Poetics that "difference" too often appears in poems simply as "subject matter and ... local color" rather than as "form and content understood as an interlocking figure the one inaudible with-the other." Indeed, there are legions of columnar poems in which the anecdote of an ethnic parent or grandparent is rehearsed in a generic voice and format, whatever the cultural setting. I was glad to find poems by Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, Kimiko Hahn, C. S. Giscombe and Wanda Coleman, among others, that embody dialectics of "otherness" in language itself, the strange and familiar interpenetrating."

"In the America where I'm writing now, suffering is diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery." We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed social relations" (Charles Bernstein)."

"Recently, I read an essay by Charles Bernstein criticizing a facile multiculturalism that can "have the effect of transforming unresolved ideological divisions and antagonisms into packaged tours of... local color of gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, region, class. . . . In this context, diversity can be a way of restoring a highly idealized conception of a unified American culture that effectively quiets dissent." Many of us, I think, have had our doubts about such a "multiculturalism" or "diversity," or symbolic "inclusion," when the real question in our radically unequal society is power and privilege...Charles Bernstein, again, has called our public space "befouled" by "spectacularly inequitable distributions of power." In this "befouled" public sphere poetry cannot hope to lend itself to social change through conventional or contaminated methods of communication. Language, the medium, "autonomous and self-sufficient," must do its work by its own methods. I am, of necessity, abbreviating and simplifying here...The public space is indeed befouled. But I also think that Bernstein and others are right when they imply that threadbare language, frozen metaphors, poems in which we "cling to / what we've grasped too well" are part of the problem, and that the power of a poem to subvert, to "intensify / our relationships" depends on its being poetry-taking on the medium of language with all its difficulties. Difficulties of relationship and strangeness, of truth-telling and torsion and how the netted bridge is to be suspended over the gorge."

"I have everything I want. I really can't think of any ambitions or things to strive for. I don't want to leave the house, I'm happy at home, I really am. I am."

"I've been living in New York for about seven years and a lot of the people that I started singing with don't sing any more, don't write any more. So the fact that I can still do that that's kind of a gift, that's what I sort of stay focused on."

"If you consider the definition of authenticity, it's saying something and actually doing it. I write my own songs. I made my own videos. I pick my producers. Nothing goes out without my permission. It's all authentic."

"Being human is difficult. Some people make it more difficult than others. I was one of those people."

"When I found somebody who I fell in love with, it made me feel different than I felt the rest of the day. It was electrifying. That's what inspired the 'Off to the Races' melodies. That's one of the times when you're feeling electrified by someone else and they make you happy to be alive."

"I have a personal ambition to live my life honestly and honor the true love that I’ve had and also the people I’ve had around me. I want to stay hopeful, even though I get scared about why we’re even alive at all."

"I wanted to be part of a high-class scene of musicians. It was half-inspired because I didn't have many friends, and I was hoping that I would meet people and fall in love and start a community around me, the way they used to do in the '60s."

"If all that I was actually going to be allowed to have by the media was money, loads of money, then fuck it … What I actually wanted was something quiet and simple: a writer's community and respect."

"There is a high fantasy element in the music, but I’m incredibly plugged into what’s going on politically, socially and pretty much in every way except pop-culturally. I’ve had a very real life, and there have been a lot of things that took a lot of strength and wherewithal to figure out… things I’m still figuring out. That’s probably why the music has such an element of escapism to it"

"When you’re an introvert like me and you’ve been lonely for a while, and then you find someone who understands you, you become really attached to them. It’s a real release."

"My best friends are rappers my boyfriends have been rappers. My dearest friends have been from all over the place, so before you make comments again about a WOC/POC issue, I’m not the one storming the capital, I’m literally changing the world by putting my life and thoughts and love out there on the table 24 seven. Respect it."

"Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn't care that working people had no work and no money for rent."

"We made for him a great dinner of honor. At this dinner I said to him, for the last time, I thought, "Goodbye, dear friend, topic of my life, now we part." And to myself I said further: Finished. This is your lonesome bed. A lady what they call fat and fifty. You made it personally. From this lonesome bed you will finally fall to a bed not so lonesome, only crowded with a million bones."

"Peter sighed. He turned the palms of his hands up as though to guess at rain. Anna knew him, theme and choreography. The sunshiny spring afternoon seeped through his fingers. He looked up at the witnessing heavens to keep what he could. He dropped his arms and let the rest go."

"Like a good and happy man increasing his virtue, he kissed her. She did not move away from him. She remained in the embrace of his right arm, her face nuzzling his shoulder, her eyes closed. He tipped her chin to look and measure opportunity. She could not open her eyes. Honorably he searched, but on her face he met no quarrel."

"In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and impervious, in full control, he cartwheeled eastward into the source of night."

"I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool."

"I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated."

"I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed."

"My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don't like you to work too hard, I understand, until you're hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!"

"With a few grasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love."

"I sighed in and I groaned out, so as to melt a certain pain around my heart. A steel ring like arthritis, at my age."

"I was happy, but I am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn't so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has too look up to them from the cellar stairs."

"It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning."

"He settles in the kitchen because the children are asleep all over the rest of the house. I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go."

"I thought of praying for divine guidance in line with the great spiritual renaissance of our time. But I am all thumbs in that kind of deciduous conversation. I asked myself, did I, as God's creature under the stars, have the right to evade an event, a factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small peradventure."

"The organization of his ideas was all wrong; I was drawn to the memory of myself -- a mere stripling of a girl -- the day I learned that the shortest distance between any two points was a great circle."

"I need to stay as ignorant in the art of teaching as I want them to remain in the art of literature. The assignments I give are usually assignments I've given myself, problems that have defeated me, investigations I'm still pursuing."

"Literature has something to do with language. There's probably a natural grammar at the tip of your tongue. You may not believe it, but if you say what's on your mind in the language that comes to you from your parents and your street and friends, you'll probably say something beautiful. Still, if you weren't a tough, recalcitrant kid, that language may have been destroyed by the tongues of school-teachers who were ashamed of interesting homes, inflection, and language and left them all for correct usage."

"A first assignment: to be repeated whenever necessary, by me or the class. Write a story, a first-person narrative in the voice of someone with whom you're in conflict. Someone who disturbs you, worries you, someone you don't understand. Use a situation you don't understand."

"No personal journals, please, for about a year. Why? Boring to me. When you find only yourself interesting, you're boring. When I find only myself interesting, I'm a conceited bore. When I'm interested in you, I'm interesting."

"Stay open and ignorant."

"Don’t go through life without reading the autobiographies of Emma Goldman, Prince Kropotkin, Malcolm X"

"Two good books to read: A Life Full of Holes, Charhadi/I Work Like a Gardener, Joan Miró"

"People like myself who must begin again and again in order to get anywhere at all."

"She remembered that he was a person who had killed."

"That was Janice, a political woman, conscious of power structure and power itself."

"Plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."

"Jack asked me, Isn't it a terrible thing to grow up in the shadow of another person's sorrow?"

"She was trying to make him feel guilty. Where were his balls? I will never respond to that question. Asked in a worried way again and again, it may become responsible for the destruction of the entire world. I gave it two minutes of silence."

"A great deal has been written about that hostility at Waterloo, as though a country that refuses to pass something as simple as the Equal Rights Amendment would not have pockets of vicious misogyny, as though a nation with tens of thousands of nuclear bombs, Army bases, weapons factories in the midst of unemployment would not be able to raise a furious patriarchal horde."

"we asked: wouldn't it have been wonderful if hundreds, thousands of Germans had sat down before gates of the Krupp gas-oven plants and troubled the contented hearts and minds of the good German people?"

"The woman on the other phone is young and in tears. She's saying, "Mom. Ma, please, it's my world they're gonna blow up." Then some silence. Then: "Ma, please, I have to do it. It's not terrible to get arrested. I'm all right, Ma, please listen, you got married and had us and everything and a house, but they still kept making nuclear bombs." More tears. "Listen, listen please, Ma." I wanted to take the phone from her and say, "Ma, don't worry, your kid's okay. She's great. Don't you see she's one of the young women who will save my granddaughter's life?""

"The elderly woman's husband said, What is in his mind? He thinks because he was once a poor boy in a poor country and he became very rich with a beautiful wife, he thinks he can bend steel with his teeth."

"But I do like this language -- wheat and chaff -- with its widening pool of foreign genes, and since I never have had any occasion to say “comestible,” it was pleasurable to think it."

"Don’t you wish you could rise powerfully above your time and name? I’m sure we all try, but here we are, always slipping and falling down into them, speaking their narrow language, though the subject, which is how to save the world--and quickly--is immense."

"[He] had invented a pinball machine. When we saw it, we said, George! This is not a pinball machine alone. This is the poem of a pinball machine, the essence made delicately concrete, and so forth.”"

"No, George said, you don’t understand. The pinball machine--any pinball machine you play in any penny arcade--is so remarkable, so fine, so shrewdly threaded. It is already beautiful in necessity and sufficiency of wire, connection, possibility."

"Thank God for the head. The head is the only place you got to be young when the usual place gets used up."

"It’s hard to stand behind a people and culture in revolutionary transition when you are constantly worried about their irreplaceable and breakable artifacts."

"[Wild] with a dream of wildness."

"What is this crap, Mother, this life is short and terrible. What is this metaphysical shit, what is this disease you intelligentsia are always talking about. First we said: Intelligentsia! Us? Oh, the way words lie down under decades, then the Union of Restless Diggers out of sheer insomnia pulls them up: daggers for the young but to us they look like flowers of nostalgia that grew in our mother’s foreign garden. What did my mother say? Darling, you should have come to Town Hall last night, the whole intelligentsia was there. My uncle, strictly: the intelligentsia will never permit it.!"

"People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they're getting older they look at each other's face a little ashamed. It's clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn't mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn't want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend's eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it's nothing at all. I hardly noticed."

"Well, a wish, some wish, Ruth said. Well, I wished that this world wouldn’t end. This world, this world, Ruth said softly."

"I have to say that war is man-made. It's made by men. It's their thing, it's their world, and they're terribly injured in it. They suffer terribly in it, but it's made by men. How do they come to live this way?"

"When I came to think as a writer, it was because I had begun to live among women."

"that, I think, is really where lots of literature comes from. It really comes, not from knowing so much, but from not knowing. It comes from what you're curious about. It comes from what obsesses you. It comes from what you want to know."

"writers who are young or maybe just young in writing. To tell them that no matter what you feel about what you're doing, if that is really what you're looking for, if that is really what you're trying to understand, if that is really what you're stupid about, if that's what you're dumb about and you're trying to understand it, stay with it, no matter what, and you'll at least live your own truth or be hung for it."

"one of the things that art is about, for me, is justice. Now, that isn't a matter of opinion, really. That isn't to say, "I'm going to show these people right or wrong" or whatever. But what art is about-and this is what justice is about, although you'll have your own interpretations-is the illumination of what isn't known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden. And I think people feel like that who are beginning to write."

"We were accused of having been doomstruck the other day. And in a way we should be, why shouldn't we be? Things are rotten. I'm sixty-one and three-quarters years old and I've seen terrible times during the Depression, and I do think the life of the people was worse during the McCarthy period. I just want to throw that in extra. That is to say the everyday life, the fearful life, of Americans was harder in that time than this. But the objective facts of world events right now are worse than at any other time. And we all know that, we can't deny it, and it's also true that it's very hard to look in the faces of our children, and terrifying to look into the faces of our grandchildren. And I cannot look at my granddaughter's face, really, without shading my eyes a little bit and saying, "Well, listen, Grandma's not going to let that happen." But we have to face it, and they have to face it, just as we had to face what was much less frightening."

"the possibility is that what we need right now is to imagine the real. That is where our leaders are falling down and where we ourselves have to imagine the lives of other people. So men-who get very pissed at me sometimes, even though I really like some of them a lot-men have got to imagine the lives of women, of all kinds of women. Of their daughters, of their own daughters, and of the lives that their daughters lead. White people have to imagine the reality, not the invention but the reality, of the lives of people of color. Imagine it, imagine that reality, and understand it. We have to imagine what is happening in Central America today, in Lebanon and South Africa. We have to really think about it and imagine it and call it to mind, not simply refer to it all the time. What happens is that when you just keep referring to things, you lose them entirely. But what if you think in terms of the life of the people, you really have to keep imagining. You have to think of the reality of what is happening down there, and you have to imagine it...that's one of the things that's most encouraging to me: to think that some of these young guys have been listening, and imagining the lives of their daughters in a new way, and thinking about it, and wanting something different for them. That is what some of imagining is about."

"For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table."

"By in love she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly stunned by the lungs' longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend"

"everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth's nation-states-hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all."

"sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world."

"People say the Vietnamese won the war. They did not win the war, the U.S. won the war, just by leaving and starving them to death. You don’t say somebody won the war in a medieval town which is under constant siege. Until the U.S. is certain that the Vietnamese lost the war, until they’re absolutely certain that their condition is totally hopeless, we’re not gonna help them. (2000)"

"I’d never known pacifists before. My parents were very peaceful people and socialists, and they were always against all wars, but pacifism was not a Russian socialist idea. Somebody invited (peace and civil rights activist and WRL staffer) Bayard Rustin to talk, and Mary Gandall and I listened to him with our mouths open. We were both so impressed—it was like the good news, as they say about Jesus. We were getting very good news about how to think about the world. (2000)"

"probably the education in nonviolent direct action couldn’t have been learned without a war. It had to take a war for people to learn that things could be defied and resisted. I think that was a very important legacy of the peace movement. (2000)"

"people think that they have to use their brains to figure out how best to retaliate or how best to make war. And it brings us to total hopelessness. (2001)"

"even when my kids were smaller, you had three — people like me had three things to do. They had the family to take care of and to worry about. And they had our political lives to lead — I mean, I should say the business of the war or whatever it was. And then we also had our work, our life work, which for me was literature, which I — which was my great good luck that I had that, because it enabled me to think in another way than a lot of other people. (2003)"

"when people say, “What can poets do?” I often say, “Just what any other working group could do to get anything accomplished, and that is to organize.” (2003)"

"That’s the thing about writing. You can bring a lot of stuff together. (2003)"

"I think that any life that’s interesting, lived, has a lot of pulls in it."

"things that concern me very much still . . . first of all, I still think a lot about Vietnam. I was there in ’69, in Hanoi, and also I traveled through all of the North from the DMZ, and so I saw an awful lot of it and I felt the people very much. I was at that time very involved in dealing with American POWs. I don’t think in my life I’ll ever get over those concerns and the injustice of the United States not simply acting out its responsibilities to Vietnam. Those things are not over for me. And the question of amnesty . . . they’re related. But I’m not as active. I act when I’m called upon. I guess I began to think of myself as more of a pacifist, which is sort of funny when you think that I was very strongly on the side of the really very fierce North Vietnamese and Vietcong. But still, I think disarmament is a tremendously important issue. So I’m really responding in many ways. I still work with the War Resisters’ League and with Resist."

"For me, somehow, the short story is very close to the poem in feeling and not so close in feeling to the novel, although it’s about the same people that a novel would be about."

"you can only teach learners. You can’t teach any subject to anybody who isn’t there to want to know."

"I write about things I don’t know all that well just to try and understand them. The act of writing is an investigative, learning act."

"I think all art, all these stories that people write, happen when two amazing facts come together in some way, or two amazing events, or two amazing winds, or whatever it is, come and the surprise of this meeting is the story."

"children’s writing is so often so beautiful, because it’s so close to their own true tongues. On the other hand, it’s very boring because they have no experience in life."

"Even as a kid, it wasn’t to big stories of heroism that I listened but to the everyday people on my block more than anything else. Since I thought of my father and mother as somewhat heroic in their early years, what interested me tremendously was how this whole other world of people living every day, how they lived their lives. I think most people are heroic to a degree, they’re heroic in caring for the lives of the people around them and not dumping each other or dumping on each other."

"I think the women’s movement is wonderful, a great thing. I hate to see some of the mean struggles within it, but I don’t see how it could exist without it. Everybody should try to be as honorable and truthful and fierce as they can be."

"if you don’t think history, you’re not thinking. You’re just not thinking if you cannot see a generation back. And if you do not think about the circumstances in their lives, then you don’t know what you’re thinking about. There’s no truth in the present moment. Now simply doesn’t exist without then at all."

"(What was your sense of what it meant to be Jewish when you were growing up?) Well, it meant to be a socialist. Well, not really. But it meant to have social consciousness. It also meant that we were related to those generations of the Jewish Bible. We had common history. Our neighborhood was solidly Jewish. Next door there could be somebody who wasn't. That would be a very exotic person. The whole block didn't have more than two people who weren't Jewish. So my idea of the world was that it was totally Jewish. And the people to be worried about and pitied are the ones outside. So there is a sense that the stranger is the one to be remembered. The reason that it's repeated in the Bible so many times that we were strangers in Egypt is really to make us behave decently. This seemed to me very much a part of being Jewish. And it wasn't a matter of hospitality, which is as American as apple pie, so to speak. It wasn't hospitality; it was a normal sense of outrage when others were treated badly, and along with that the idea that injustice not be allowed to continue."

"(A lot of people we've talked to said that Israel's invasion of Lebanon in '82 was a real jolt. People who for years hadn't thought about their Jewishness were sort of forced to start thinking about it in relationship to Israel. Did that have an effect on you?) GP: Well, since I think a lot about politics, it had an effect on me. But it didn't have a jolting or a changing effect. It wasn't so much a surprise as a new reason for sorrow and disgust. I was pleased at the services that year that this young fellow really spoke out very strongly. Sometimes I think that the Left has really made some terrible mistakes. I was talking about it the other day-the way the people in Nicaragua can separate the people of this US from the government. And that is partly a result of a decision by the Left. It's not just a strategy decision, it's true. It's a decision which the Left made in Vietnam, which was to divide the country. A very sensible, simple thing to do, to see us as opposed to the government. True too. It did not weaken the people of Nicaragua or Vietnam. So, I've never understood why my sisters and brothers on the Left haven't been able to do the same in relation to Israel. And if they'd done it a long time ago, I think things could have been different. If they had pointed out again and again: the people and the government, I mean, the difference at that time. A big majority of the American people were not yet against the war in Vietnam when the Vietnamese said, "We know you're not the government." There were maybe nine people on assorted street corners in '62, '63, '64 and the Vietnamese were already talking like that, right? So it's not as if you would have had to say the majority of the people in Israel are against this. Enough of them were in opposition. Why it wasn't done I-I know why it wasn't done. (Why?) Anti-Semitism. (Has that changed at all with the Left? Gotten worse? Or do you think it's the same?) No, I think in some ways it's better. In the women's movement press, too. You were really both very useful and really strong and influential. And I think a lot of women began to think seriously about anti-Semitism. Just because women started to stand up, others suddenly realized they had legs."

"You know in my lifetime, Jews have been very close to Blacks, really have had very close relations, and I just happen to be reading this book When and Where I Enter (by Paula Giddings)."

"If you I live long enough you really become patient. People improve. If they're already wonderful, they become slowly more wonderful."

"You can't talk about anything without bringing in the world. It's out there."

"That word identity has been hard for many women who live secular lives and maybe harder for religious women and also feminists. But the women's movement has made a big difference. I don't know who it hasn't helped in this world. It's given a lot of Jewish women courage to stay Jewish and fight."

"we had our normal family life—struggles and hard times. That takes up a lot of time, hard times. Uses up whole days."

"it was kind of exhausting running after two babies. Still, looking back I see the pleasure of it. That’s when I began to know women very well—as co-workers, really...If I hadn’t spent that time in the playground, I wouldn’t have written a lot of those stories."

"Writers often write about what they want to read or haven’t seen written."

"there’s always that first storytelling impulse: I want to tell you something..."

"A lot of them (my stories) begin with a sentence—they all begin with language...Very often one sentence is absolutely resonant...The sound of the story comes first."

"what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality."

"(Are there any men you think write particularly well about women?) I liked Norman Rush’s last book, Mating. The main character is a very smart woman, very intellectual, very interesting, and very unlike many of the women many women write about."

"I read poetry all the time. Probably the poets everybody read then. Very catholic taste. I even loved Eliot then whom I later grew not to love. I knew lots of poems by memory and walked around mumbling them. Yeats, Rilke, Keats, Coleridge. I liked Milton a lot, for some reason. And then there were the Oscar Williams anthologies of 1942 and 1943 with those pictures of the beautiful young poets."

"Russian is very dear to me because it’s a family language, but I am Jewish-Russian, which is a little different from Russian-Russian. My family ran away in 1905 from the Russian-Russians."

"I’ve been surrounded by music for most of my life. Always classical. But I think the most powerful sounds are those voices, those childhood voices. The tune of those voices. Other languages, Russian and Yiddish, coming up smack against the English. I think you hear that a lot in American literature."

"I will say I knew I wanted to write about women and children, but I put it off for a couple of years because I thought, People will think this is trivial, nothing. Then I thought, It’s what I have to write. It’s what I want to read. And I don’t see it out there. Meanwhile, the women’s movement had begun to gather force. It needed to become the second wave. It turned out that we were some of the drops in the wave. Tillie Olsen was more like a cupful."

"There’s hardly a woman writer who doesn’t receive some kind of support from the women’s movement. We’re very lucky to be living and writing now."

"the outside world will trivialize you for almost anything if it wants to. You may as well be who you are."

"In 1959 it was absolutely insane for Ken McCormick to say, yes, he was going to publish a book of short stories. Now everybody in the writing world is reading and writing short stories."

"a lot more women are writing. A lot of people who wouldn’t have written are writing. When a couple of black women speak, the throats of many are opened. Somehow or other they give courage and sound to their sisters."

"You can’t write without a lot of pressure. Sometimes the pressure comes from anger, which then changes into a pressure to write...The pressure from anger is an energy that can be violent or useful or useless. Also the pressure doesn’t have to be anger. It could be love. One could be overcome with feelings of lifetime love or justice."

"I hate the American expectation of violence. I’m not going to play into any of that. When I must write about violence, I will, but I’ll do it straight, not add and add because the level is higher every year."

"art comes from constant mental harassment."

"It’s a different life (being a parent). Another creature is really dependent on you. I think it’s good for a writer, though. I know some people say women writers should not have children. Of course, it was worse for them back then. Years ago just to do the kids’ wash could take the whole day, so if you were poor it was impossible to write. If you were rich, you could hire a maid; it was possible if you were George Sand. But even now we need help. My kids were in day care from the time they were three years old."

"I always say that racism is like pneumonia and anti-Semitism is like the common cold—everybody has it."

"The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write."

"Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in. I developed a definition-which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world-that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me. (1978 interview)"

"("Do you write when you have to? Or when do you write?") GP: I write all the time, in a way. I'm not a very disciplined person. I write. I wrote yesterday, a little. Writing is a habit, among other things, and if you're a writer you'd better get into the habit. A lot of people don't realize that. When I'm writing a story then I'm really writing all the time, wholly involved in it. When I'm not writing a story, I'm still thinking....Susan Sontag once said that she can't wait to get to a typewriter so she'll know what she thinks! And that's true for most writers, that you really have gotten this habit of thinking on paper. Until you do that all you have is a lot of junk in your head, a lot of stuff swirling around, and the paper is the place where you really begin to think. (1979)"

"I don't see television the way most people do. I see it as a destroyer of concentration rather than of language. There's dead language everywhere. We're cut off from the truth of our tongues. (1980)"

"People's imagination has been changed a lot by television. (1980)"

"all the arts feed each other (1980)"

"(Why didn't you stick with poetry?) GP: I write a lot of poetry. I just never get good. Poetry is too literary a thing which comes from my love of literature rather than from my love of people, my feeling for people. (1980)"

"Concentration is really a problem for me. To seize something. But when I really have a story I'm working on, I can work on it sitting in a train, going to Washington, any place, anywhere. It's totally absorbing. (1980)"

"I think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood. (1980)"

"the world may not last. Just the other day Ronald Reagan said that the arms race is necessary. He has to be insane. INSANE! And all the people listening. They have to be insane too. (1980)"

"I never think about marriage. I never write about marriage. I do think a lot about family. I think about love and family (1980)"

"People move around too much, and they become afraid to speak their own language. (1980)"

"I think people have writer's block because they don't really write things down. Their minds are too linear. You have blocks when either you have nothing to write about or you are just going dead ahead. If you just write, if you realize what your mind is and that it's always working, you're always wondering, you're always curious, you're always thinking about things. (1980)"

"you're in love many times in your life, several times in one's life. And romantic love is very... a lot of fun, I don't want to knock it. With all the troubles that come afterward, and it may all be a lie and imposed on us, but falling in love is peachy. And if it can happen to you, boy, that's great. And if it doesn't, then by all means, you should stick to your friends. (1981)"

"Someone like Mary Daly doesn't even know how people live-but other women, I think they come from suburban lives or something like that, and no family. That's a certain kind of life but it's not general female life. (1981)"

"All of art is political; if a writer says this is not political, it's probably the most political thing that he could be doing. That's a statement of an alienation problem. I would say that my interest in ordinary life and how people live is a very political one. That's politics; that's what it is. (1982)"

"I'd been writing poetry until about 1956, and then I just sort of made up my mind that I had to write stories. I love the whole tradition of poetry, but I couldn't figure out a way to use my own Bronx English tongue in poems. I can now, better, but those early poems were all very literary; they picked up after whatever poet I was reading. They used what I think of as only one ear: you have two ears, one is for the sound of literature and the other is for your neighborhood, for your mother and father's house. (1982)"

"One of the horses history rides is language. Fifteen years ago, maybe ten, in my fifties, I wouldn't have noticed the word mankind at all. And here in 1986, a six-year-old person heard the word in all its meaning. (1985)"

"My generation really grew up at a very scary time. This time is probably twice as scary, but since we didn't know this time was coming-the Second World War was coming, the Spanish Civil War was happening when I was in high school. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and made all those idiotic statements that are famous to this day. Like how beautiful it was to bomb the Ethiopians. The Italian kids in my school were in heaven, they were so delighted and proud they were fainting with joy. It was a scary time. Hitler was coming inch by inch by inch. I remember my parents talking about it. (1985)"

"I'm really involved in a lot of feminist anti-militarist work. I've linked things together with my anti-war stuff. Many feminists don't see it that way, by the way. There are a lot of divisions. Women say that's not feminism; feminism is equal rights, day care, battered women, abortion. But they don't see the connection between the patriarchy of militarism and the patriarchy of ordinary daily life. They don't like that patriarchy but they don't seem to mind so much the patriarchy of intervention in Central America. (1985)"

"I always think that the writer's role is to get off her or his ass and to get on the street and do something. But that answer does not satisfy people. But to me that's a very important thing. (1985)"

"I begin every class, for instance, with the reading of poems, of something somebody thinks is beautiful. Like sort of a ritual, like saying grace, or thank you God, or something. Somebody comes in and picks up a poem and reads a poem by George Herbert or reads a poem by almost anybody. Somebody read two pages of Faulkner yesterday. I want them to read something they love. So at least two poems are read at the beginning of class-or fiction. (1986)"

"I'm a writer but I'm also a person in the world. I don't feel a terrible obligation to write a lot of books. (1988)"

"We keep being mean-we're still mean to Vietnam. Mean to Cuba. Mean to Haiti. That kind of meanness is more discouraging to me than almost anything. You can put it in economic terms, you can make a high-class theoretical discussion about it, but there is so much mean revenge and malice against the victories of ordinary people. (1993)"

"I can't see me writing an autobiography. I mean it seems so stupid. [Laughter.] You have to feel like you are telling the world something. I feel I'm doing it when I write the way I write. (1995)"

"I think the world is worse, but the people are better. I think this has to do with the revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s and the work we all did in that period. The important thing to remember about the Iraq war is that the whole world protested against it. For the first time in history, the whole world, not just me and my husband Bob, but the whole world came together to try to stop a war before it started. That had never happened before. I have a book with pictures of those protests from all over the world, from Africa, from Asia, from all over Europe. In every country people said, “No, no, don’t do it, don’t do it.” Whatever happens now, this fact is in the world. I think with those protests, we made maybe a couple of inches of progress. Some light flared there for a minute and that minute may be carried on. That’s why I say the world right now is a little worse, mostly because of what our country is doing, but the people are better because almost everywhere in the world there are people who are really thinking that they have some responsibility to make a peaceful world and to live decently. We’ll see what the next generation can do."

"everybody should be involved, not just the artists. Carpenters, teachers, everybody."

"I’m an American. I don’t feel national pride or anything like that, but on the other hand I’m very interested in this country. I’m very interested in the history of it, and I feel that it does have some valuable ideas that really have transformed many people. Certainly this is true when I think of my own parents coming here and all the other immigrants who have come here. They came for a reason, and they were satisfied, one way or the other."

"these old time immigrants are not standing up enough for the newer immigrants—the Latino people who have been coming across the Mexican border and others."

"I still remember my mother reading the newspaper at the table when I was a kid. Apparently the Nazi party has just gotten itself together, and Hitler is in power. It must be around 1939, maybe a little earlier. My mother says to my father, “Look, Zenia, it’s beginning again.” Those words— “it’s beginning again”—have reverberated in my ears all my life. It’s beginning again. The fear you hear in those words. As a person who has never really suffered any prejudice, I remember those words."

"I read a lot. In poetry, I liked W. H. Auden more than anyone. I loved British writers and the novels I grew up with, Twain, Dickens, and so on. I was not influenced say by Walt Whitman or anyone like that. His freedom was not my freedom, and so it didn’t affect me. But Saul Bellow had begun to write already. He freed the Jewish voice in some ways that I didn’t even recognize, but his work was all about men. Still, for Jews who are crazy about the English language, he was the one."

"Tillie Olsen and I didn’t know it, but we were part of a movement."

"(What advice do you give to younger writers?) Have a low overhead. Don’t live with anybody who doesn’t support your work. Very important. And read a lot. Don’t be afraid to read or of being influenced by what you read. You’re more influenced by the voice of childhood than you are by some poet you’re reading. The last piece of advice is to keep a paper and pencil in your pocket at all times, especially if you’re a poet. But even if you’re a prose writer, you have to write things down when they come to you, or you lose them, and they’re gone forever. Of course, most of them are stupid, so it doesn’t matter. But in case they’re the thing that solves the problem for the story or the poem or whatever, you’d better keep a pencil and a paper in your pocket."

"I think that’s what literature is about; it’s the struggle for truth. It’s the struggle for what you don’t understand"

"If you look out that window, it’s so amazing, and the countryside is being murdered. People don’t understand what is being done to their countryside. In some parts of the world, they seem to understand it better than here. Here we don’t seem to get it that the fields are being wrecked by poisons and the air is close to the end of breathable. There is a great effort in America to stay happy and not worry and not understand and not do anything about it."

"I want people to look at the world and see what’s happening to it and take some action. This planet is so lovable. It is so various and so lovable, including all sorts of parts of the world that I’ve never seen, and I’ve seen more than most people. Just in what your eyes see, and how people live on the earth, it’s amazing, but it’s going to end if we don’t get our leaders to pay attention."

"Human beings come from several million years of development, which is quite wonderful. I have a lot of regard for what human beings have become. It took us a million years to learn how to speak to each other, and we did it. It took us another million years to work with each other, and we did it. I think the human race is remarkable…Until we live in a world where we stop abusing each other and the other creatures, we will not have reached our perfection."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"Her peers have praised her publicly. Philip Roth called her a "genuine writer of prose," and Herbert Gold, "an exciting writer." Susan Sontag, perhaps selling short Paley's deliberate artistry, called her "a rare kind of writer"-a "natural." Donald Barthelme said simply she was "wonderful.""

"On the literary front, Grace Paley is the nation’s — one of the most acclaimed writers in the nation."

"All over the world, she is read as a master storyteller in the great tradition: People love life more because of her writing."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...I had the extreme honor of reading with Grace several times. On one occasion there was the potential of some political differences with the audience. Nervous, I asked Grace what we should do if we were heckled. She said, “Honey, we’ll just sink to their level.” Then she stood on a box because she was too tiny to reach the microphone and quickly made everyone fall in love with her."

"things are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable."

"people joke about leaflet prose, but I've been writing and reading leaflets and I challenge my sister and brother writers to try to write a leaflet that moves people to action. I've seen it done. The Women's Pentagon Action statement, written in 1980 by Grace Paley in collaboration with dozens of women, actually inspired a lot of us to take action."

"Grace Paley's outrageously wise story, "Zagrowsky Tells.""

"Grace Paley says, "By the third line, I know whether it's going to turn into a poem or a story. With poems, I talk to people. In stories, they talk to me.""

""Can you think of a writer (besides Chekhov) who is holy and an artist?" "Grace Paley." She (Mary Gordon) smiled. "Well, yes." Obviously."

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"if you’re going to be involved with the Left, you’ve got to start thinking about Israel. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and I became very committed to supporting the Women in Black in ‘87. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting."

"she knew so well how be free in them"

"who does the world need more these days than Grace Paley? I’m fudging, of course, because these two stories were published originally in different books, but The Collected Stories by Grace Paley is as good a manual as I know of what fiction can accomplish on the page and in the world."

"Grace, guide us! What is politics to you?/You are such a brave activist!/How do we live, what do we do?/Politics is simply the way human beings treat/one another on the earth."

"It is, as Paley has said elsewhere, not the I" but the "we" that is important."

"Poet Robert Pinsky knew Paley for more than 20 years, and he loved her poetry and short fiction. "They're completely lucid," he said. "They take the materials of a life, and make those materials immensely beautiful — that's art.""

"At the age of 62, Grace Paley has published just three collections of stories, a total of 45 tales. But nearly all of them are remarkable for their clarity, their sense of place, their sympathies. As Philip Roth has said, Paley's stories display "an understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness, and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike"...Paley is a genuine article, unpretentious, funny, and wise. In the words of her neighbor and colleague in fiction, Donald Barthelme, she is a "wonderful writer and troublemaker." Paley's second-floor living room is vintage Village. Bookshelves crammed with Babel and Chekhov and Marx, records piled into a Hellman's mayonnaise box, a sad rag rug, artifacts of politics, woolly pillows strewn on the floor, three empty light sockets in the ceiling. The lived-in look."

"What I love most in Grace Paley's poetry is her unquenchable sense that the artist's life is not somewhere at the margins of community, that a dialogue is necessary between the poet and her people. The North American enterprise has injured this dialogue. Paley's exuberant, heartbreaking, committed poems call it back to health."

"she tells her sad/funny stories and wry parables, in a wisecracking, ironic New York voice that sounds like no other-except, amazingly, Isaac Babel...Paley can do for time what astrophysicists do for space: whether stretching or shrinking it, they deepen the mystery with every advance in describing it...With its vision of universal reconciliation, Paley's sensibility simply cannot be restricted by the ordinary boundaries of space or time. Paley has sometimes been criticized for allowing her passionate commitment to politics to "interfere" with her art, but the two feed each other, are in fact one. Paley is as political as García Marquez or Camus. In story after story she demonstrates the inseparability of "private" and "public" passions-especially the passion to save the children, which she implicitly equates with saving the world. In Paley's universe children ("babies, those round, staring, day-in-day-out companions of her youth"), the ever-precarious next generation, are the raison d'être of political action. When Faith asks herself, recalling the PTA struggles of a bygone time, "Now what did we learn that year?" her answer is "The following: Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.""

"Grace Paley makes me weep and laugh-and admire. She is that rare kind of writer, a natural, with a voice like no one else's: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute."

"Grace Paley...is funny and poignant, a writer of great power and great delicacy. She is one of our finest-and most original-poets."

"Fiction for me is a way of "writing what you don’t know about what you know," to quote Grace Paley."

"I am a miser of my memories of you"

"The core and the surface Are essentially the same Words making them seem different Only to express appearance. If name be needed, wonder names them both: From wonder into wonder existence opens."

"A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick."

"Death hallows what it touches. This is a truth to which every heart, not utterly divested of the better feelings of our nature, will yield a ready assent; and he who violates the sanctuary of the grave is looked upon by all who acknowledge this truth as little less sacrilegious than the wretch who profanes the temple of his God. If such is the general feeling towards him who disturbs the sleep of the common dead—of beings unloved in life—and bound to him by no dearer tie than that of mere humanity; how lively must be the indignation, how deep the abhorrence and how bitter the denunciations against him who stands forth the accuser of his earliest, dearest friend: the revealer of follies and of crimes which—though they draw tears of blood from him in secret—should be hidden, as the miser hides his treasure, from the knowledge of the world, and who brands with eternal infamy that name which above all names has the power of reviving in his heart the buried recollections of his infant years! And that wretched being am I! But the task which I have assumed—though Heaven knows how unwillingly!—however it may wring my heart, I dare not shrink from the performance of."

"We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."

"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to "save Western civilization," without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that Christ could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God's will, but to enlist God's assistance in maintaining our "continually increasing consumption." And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."

"She is incredibly articulate. She means what she says and she says what she means. Her metaphors are what make her poetry, and they ring true."

"The inner life has no boundaries"

"We are infants compared to the universe"

"Intelligence and feelings forming alliances for seeing."

"How I love to listen./Remind myself there is more to the world./How I have learned to grow from it."

"Take off the mask. Discard it."

"See for yourself/the you inside no one else can see."

"Climb the stairway of your imagination"

"I want to know/who will decide our fate?/You, or I, or WE together?/Will I be free to discover my own path?"

"Poems are for the livin', that's what I know."

"within these verses is history"

"Discovering new meanings for old words/listed in the encyclopedia of colonialism."

"forming bridges of correspondence from old to new worlds."

"I seek poems that rise from the ashes"

"suspended from the high branches of an old wisdom tree"

"born/from the holy tree where one is brother/to all brothers, sister/to all sisters."

"Bureaucrats shifting responsibility,/shuffling lives into despair"

"My father's family is Puerto Rican, my mother's family is Dominican. I start with Puerto Rican-Dominican, then I go to Borinqueña-Quisqueyana, because Borinqueña means I am a native of Borinquen, the Taino name for Puerto Rico, and Quisqueyana means I am a native of Quisqueya, the Taino name for the Dominican Republic. The Tainos were the indigenous people who inhabited the islands of the Caribbean before Columbus arrived and renamed their land. So if someone calls you Borinqueño, Boricua, or Quisqueyana, they're saying that you're someone who identifies with your past and your culture. It's also a reference to nationhood. I'm making connections to my history by tagging that on. The Africana identifies another part of my roots. I'm saying that I'm American, born in the Bronx, but I'm also Taino and African."

"I disagree with the statements that all Tainos were wiped out because many fled and hid in the mountains; they mixed and married, so the Taino is still very present in our society. Recent DNA testing has proved this to be true in spite of what the history books tell us. You know, you can't always believe those accounts written in books. It depends on who is writing it and why, what is the point they are getting at to try and convince whoever may be the reader."

"I'm still a painter. I consider myself a painter who uses poetry as a different way of painting. It wasn't until I was in college that I started experimenting with words and language."

"When I was young, I was placed in a boarding school where I was not allowed to speak my natural Spanish, which was all I spoke until I was five. Not being allowed to speak Spanish in school traumatized me with inhibitions about speaking."

"In boarding school, in the second grade I made the decision that I was going to be an artist because I wouldn't have to talk. I could express myself with colors, and it was safe...So I basically became a listener, an observer. My mother thought that something was wrong with me. I became an extreme introvert who wouldn't talk. You wouldn't believe that about me today because I'm very different, but back then I had a lot of fears about language. It wasn't until that art class that I opened up to words. I started experimenting and incorporating words into some of my drawings."

"(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things."

"I write visually. I'm a painter who uses words."

"When students write, they often generalize. I want them to be specific, so I ask them to imagine that they're creating a movie, that they're using a camera, and that they have to describe each shot for the listening audience. So I stress detail to overcome the hurdle of generalizing."

"When I started writing, there were only two women writers that I knew: Lorraine Sutton and Margie Simmons. There were very few Latinas writing in English... So when I started, I was mainly surrounded by men-Pedro Pietri, Jesus Papoleto Melendez, Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Tato Laviera. Many of them had books already published. I was like a sponge, absorbing different things from these male contemporaries."

"I feel live I'm constantly evolving into my own voice."

"We know the projections about Latinos becoming the largest minority within the next few years, but you can go to Barnes and Noble across the street, where they have a department store of books, or any other franchise bookstore anywhere in the States, and you won't even find one aisle devoted to Latino literature. So what are they trying to tell us-that we don't have a literature? Or that we don't read or write or buy books? None of this is true. We are a community with a vibrant and extensive literature, but we are still a marginalized culture, even now in this new millennium."

"There is the argument that anyone's writing is meant to be shared with the universe. I want to die knowing that my children are going to have some kind of legacy because this is all I have to give-my work."

"I'm still angry, but I'm angry in a different way. I've released a lot of it. I'm still frustrated about a lot of things about the marginalization that happens to us. It keeps showing its face."

"We have only to look at the devastation reaped upon Vieques to understand why we have to demand our autonomy."

"My position is that people should be able to determine for themselves. I believe in the right of choice and self-determination. I also believe that people should not be exploited unless they agree to it. And who does?"

"When I was in Cuba, I saw some things that really impressed me. When we arrived, on the way to the hotel we were driving through the streets late at night. I expressed concern when I saw a woman walking alone. Our chaperone told us that they don't have the same issues of sexual exploitation and rape like in the United States. And then I also saw that they had twenty-four-hour day care. That made sense. I saw free hospitalization and free education"

"I'm definitely English dominant. I've learned to think and feel in English, although on occasions Spanish comes back."

"Sometimes, within the African American community, being Latina can be a liability rather than an asset. But then, that's why it's important to know our history, to know how we are connected, how we are victims of the diaspora that divided our families and plunged us into ideas of segregation and disunity. It's so important to know our history to overcome the misconceptions about race and culture."

"I didn't know anything about my Puerto Rican or Dominican culture until I was in my late twenties. This information was not taught or available in the schools. And it's still pretty much the case. I go into the schools today, and one of the first lessons I do with the children is to talk about the Taino Indians. You would think with all the information available today, that students would know something. But the kids are amazed when they hear me talk about this. I ask them if they know the meaning of Borinqueña or Quisqueyana. Even in Washington Heights, in a school that is predominantly Dominican, they don't know where Quisqueya comes from, even though they've heard it a thousand times. They don't know that it's a Taino word. They don't know that it was the Indian name of their island. So this information is still missing, yet still terribly important."

"I want to learn about my past, my culture. She (her mother) talks to me in broken English, reminding me how wonderful it is to be an American; I talk to her in broken Spanish, attempting to explain why I want to know more about our history and culture."

"Now you have Latino studies departments in some of the universities. And even though some of these are still highly marginalized and no more than token gestures of integration, inclusion, and diversification, where you get only one or two classes, there's still a demand for it. People want this information. This is a multicultural society. People are tired and bored with exclusivity."

"I think there are many people out there who are ready and want to embrace a multicultural ideology."

"how we are marginalized, how whole communities are sedated with the new slavery of drugs, how we are easily offered various forms of addiction to cope with our situations, anything from drugs, alcohol, religion, sex, television, food, money-take your pick. A poet named Safiya said, "We all are addicted to something." But we still manage to dream in spite of it."

"The poet is a truth bearer of reality and image. We live in a society of denial that doesn't want to see or hear these truth tales, so consequently poets are shunned to a great degree because people don't always want to hear the truth."

"In the old days poets used to go into the factories and the sugar and tobacco plantations and recite to the workers while they were doing their thing. No more. Perhaps it's a fear of intelligence, of language. A fear of self-realization."

"I was raised by my mother, but around my father's family. She was alone. My father's family rejected my mother because she was too dark, and they were only a slight shade lighter. Their attitude was based on racist criteria of appearances that people had back then, when the hue of your skin defined who you were, where you were able to go, what you I could learn, do, and achieve in life."

"Music has been a very important part of my life."

"while one might see a struggle for linguistic identity through Esteves' use of Spanish and English or for a way to connect to Puerto Rico through her reference to Puerto Rican independence fighter Lolita Lebrón, I cannot disconnect these themes from her self-definition as "Taíno Africana," where her claim to indigeneity is embedded in her recognition of her blackness. Her struggle for language, like Tato Laviera's, is not just linguistic, cultural or national, but also racial. When Esteves cannot find her voice, "Pero con what voice do my lips move?/ Rhythms of rosa wood feet dancing bomba/ Not even here. But here. Y conga," she turns to African rhythms present in Puerto Rican music. The "we" then that "defy translation" and are "Nameless," then are not just Nuyoricans. They are Afro-Latin@s."

"Melissa Castillo-Garsow, ¡Manteca!: An Anthology of Afro-Latin@ Poets"

"I wanted everything — very earnestly and totally — I wanted to have every experience I could have, I wanted everything that was possible to a person in a female body, and that meant that I wanted to be mother. ... So my feeling was, 'Well' — as I had many times had the feeling — 'Well, nobody's done it quite this way before but fuck it, that’s what I'm doing, I'm going to risk it."

"I decided I didn't want to live with a man. My family experience of growing up made me think that living with men wasn't a nice idea. I had lots of lovers, and I asked people if they wanted to father a kid, and everybody thought I was insane, and finally I didn't ask — I just got pregnant and had Jeanne."

"I have just realized that the stakes are myself I have no other"

"get up, put on your shoes, get started, someone will finish"

"Left to themselves people grow their hair. Left to themselves they take off their shoes. Left to themselves they make love sleep easily share blankets, dope & children they are not lazy or afraid they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one another."

"avoid the folk who find Bonnie and Clyde too violent"

"but don’t get uptight : the guns will not win this one, they are an incidental part of the action which we better damn well be good at, what will win is mantras, the sustenance we give each other, the energy we plug into"

"NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down."

"Diane di Prima, revolutionary activist of the 1960s Beat literary renaissance, heroic in life and poetics: a learned humorous bohemian, classically educated and twentieth-century radical, her writing, informed by Buddhist equanimity, is exemplary in imagist, political and mystical modes [...] She broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity."

"For six decades, her writing confronted the traditional stereotypes of the female body, how it should look, weigh, and be desired. She was, to my eye, the real sexual liberator of the sixties — a woman who wrote dangerously, lived wildly, and loved daringly, right up to her very last breath. [...] Diane di Prima knew firsthand what it was like to make a seat for herself at tables that had no space for women like her — women who challenged the system, and who thrived in the act. She was always in coalition with such women, and you can hear echoes of her work in the "fight the patriarchy" slogans of modern feminism. She ... was raised by the women in her mother’s family to understand that men are just "a luxury," not a necessity for women's survival. To survive in this world as a woman, she learned, was to live in a state of insurgency, and to make peace with that fact. ... She saw herself as a weapon to be deployed — no, detonated — against her oppressors. She wrote about the equality of the sexes. She wrote about women as wolves, women as predators, as hunters, as villains. She wrote about fat women, queer women, androgynous women, disobedient women, women as Gods, as birds, as the wind."

"We had a birthday party for her when she turned 80 and there were, you know, punk rockers and, you know, trans people and old hippies and beatniks and little teenagers."

"You, Beloved, are the silvery lake shimmering in the desert of my youth."

"She stands, a guardian of the endless sea, Her garb is golden, and her lips are flame, She is the portal of Eternity And Beauty is the realm from whence she came! She is the voice of many bleeding lands— America, she calls! To Arms! Arise! For like a shimmering sabre in the skies In scarlet glow she stands A guardian of the earth and sea— Liberty!"

"Bring me a languid woman, perfumed, young, Her dusky body hung with dazzling gems And strange, exotic iridescent stuffs — Her wanton eyes like thirsty summer moons."

"Bring me a pale flower-boy, White-limbed like a young heifer in a field, His lips a-quiver with unknown desire.... His soft throat virgin beneath my kiss, His bosom like a bower of stars."

"There is a little place in me That cries like any child, To be as forest things are, free, Lonely, and strange and wild!"

"All paths lead to you Where e'er I stray, You are the evening star At the end of day. All paths lead to you Hill-top or low, You are the white birch In the sun's glow. All paths lead to you Where e'er I roam. You are the lark-song Calling me home!"

"I shall go smiling Into the great beyond, Looking upon the silence as release, Looking upon the darkness as a dream, Looking upon the deep unknown as rest."

"Weep not for those Who sink within the arms of death Ere yet the chilling wintry breath Of sorrow o'er them blows; But weep for them who here remain, The mournful heritors of pain, Condemn'd to see each bright joy fade, And mark grief's melancholy shade Flung o'er Hope's fairest rose."

"Sorrow treads heavily, and leaves behind A deep impression e’en when she departs; While joy trips by, with steps light as the wind, And scarcely leaves a trace upon our hearts Of the faint footfalls, only this is sure — In this world nought, save suffering can endure."

"The gathered rose, and the stolen heart, Can charm but for a day."

"Like lamps in Eastern sepulchres, Amid my heart’s deep gloom, Affection sheds its holiest light Upon my husband’s tomb. And, as those lamps, if brought once more To upper air grow dim, So my soul’s love is cold and dead, Unless it glow for him."

"The charm of eloquence, — the skill To wake each secret string, And from the bosom's chords at will Life's mournful music bring, — The o'ermastering strength of mind, which sway The haughty and the free, Whose might earth's mightiest one obeys, These, — these were given to thee."

"Oh never yet did Peace her chaplet twine, To lay upon base Mammon’s sordid shrine, Where Earth’s most precious things are bought and sold; Thrown on that pile, the "pearl of price" would be Despised, because unfit for merchantry."

"Peace, sweet Peace, is always found In her eternal home on holy ground."

"When the glad sun, exulting in his might, Comes from the dusky-curtain'd tents of night."

"Like the sweet melody which faintly lingers Upon the wind-harp's strings at close of day, When gently touch'd by evening's dewy fingers It breathes a low and melancholy lay; So the calm voice of sympathy meseemeth; And while its magic spell is round me cast, My spirit in its cloistered silence dreameth, And vaguely blends the future with the past."

"Number the riches by thy memory hoarded, Relics of joys thy by-past years have known, — How many real things has life afforded? How much true light was o'er thy pathway thrown?"

"— The grave's dark portal Soon shuts this world of shadows from our view, Then shall we grasp realities immortal, If to the truth within us we are true."

"There dwelleth in the sinlessness of youth A sweet rebuke that vice may not endure."

"I have been really focused on this idea that I’m coming from a line of people who started this work, and I have to continue"

"I’m really glad to be a part of that because I think that I represent so many — I hate to say it — marginalized identities: I am African American. I am a woman. I am a queer person. I am disabled. I’ve got a lot of these things going on that inform my daily life"

"So any opportunity I have to be a part of a forum (to) engage people to celebrate and to amplify diverse voices and to hold on — in the face of all these attacks on (diversity, equity and inclusion), things like that — to the very simple idea that diversity makes us better, that’s always a good thing"

"I noticed that students are more receptive to videos than they are to assigned readings and things like that. And so I’m trying to negotiate, ‘How do we make that happen?’ How do I let them know that this is still an ongoing thing: That 100 years ago, we were still talking about issues of racial discrimination, sexist discrimination. That this is not a new thing? … So, trying to bridge those gaps is a little bit difficult. And I think that there is a lot of apathy"

"I, as an older person need to be like, ‘All right, I’ll work with you on this.’ I’ve tried to pass this torch, you know, and be supportive, but we can’t just point fingers at them and be like, ‘Oh, they’re lazy. They don’t want to do anything"

"The people who tend to call themselves allies are usually the people with privilege, who will not have a mutual benefit from whatever they're trying to help with"

"The mutual benefit would be, 'Wow, now both black and white people won't be suspected of shoplifting"

"Well, white people already had that. So, what do they gain out of this? Black people are free to shop. But what do the white people get [that they didn't already have]"

"This really makes sense because what we're doing is conspiring to shut down entire systems of oppression"

"We are challenging that system and so we have to conspire. We have to plot and plan the ways in which we can tear those systems down"

"The last thing I'm interested in is someone who is slapping a label on themselve as a way to be recognized as a good person"

"There’s a privilege to being able to go to school and see someone standing at the front that looks like you. It’s not until you get the teacher who looks like you, who’s teaching a class on African American studies. That changed my life. I said, ‘What is this? I did not know any of this!’ It was the first time that I felt like I was learning something about where I came from that was not revolving around being subservient to someone else or less than someone else"

"I read “The Education of The Negro Prior To 1861” and I understood what Carter G. Woodson was talking about. The pain that I felt that it took me becoming an adult to first learn these things was traumatizing to me. And all I could think to myself was, ‘What about everyone else? They’re not studying themselves. What will they become?’ And that’s where we get stuck in a lot of things"

"What our ancestors and elders have been trying to do is make things better for each generation. But we equate better with proximity to whiteness and we have to stop doing that… Sometimes the consequence is a separation from cultural traditions and affinity… But cultural memory is strong. Even when you are displaced or removed or separated from each other, that memory is there"

"We are all the same people. Understand that the boat just went to different places. We originated in the same spots. We are all the same"

"No one wants to hear that we might be in a psychological state that weakens us or renders us unable to serve them; we must be strong at all times and no one wants to hear otherwise"

"But when Black women sing, we seem to be given permission to perform pain for others to consume. People demand that Black women singers emote suffering and go so far as to call it their “best” music"

"Happiness and joy don’t sell as well as suffering and crawling our ways up seemingly insurmountable hills. No, people are incredibly entertained by Black women’s suffering to the point of wishing ill upon us to see what the output will be"

"For the dear old Flag I die, Mother, dry your weeping eye; For the honor of our land And the dear old Flag I die."

"To do Thy holy will; To bear Thy cross; To trust Thy mercy still, In pain or loss; Poor gifts are these to bring, Dear Lord, to Thee, Who hast done everything For me!"

"After the shower, the tranquil sun; After the snow, the emerald leaves; Silver stars when the day is done; After the harvest, golden grain."

"Brave the storm with firm endevor, Let your vain repinings go! Hopeful hearts will find forever— Roses underneath the snow."

"Come, little leaves," said the wind one day,— "Come o'er the meadows with me, and play; Put on your dresses of red and gold: Summer is gone, and the days grow cold."

"October gave a party; The leaves by hundreds came— The Ashes, Oaks and Maples, And leaves of every name. The Sunshine spread a carpet, And everything was grand, Miss Weather led the dancing; Professor Wind, the band"

"O, Genevieve, sweet Genevieve, The days may bring me joy or woe, But still the hands of Memory weave The blissful dreams of long ago, Sweet Genevieve!"

"Shatter her beauteous breast ye may; The Spirit of England none can slay! Dash the bomb on the dome of Paul's, — Deem ye the fame of the Admiral falls? Pry the stone from the chancel floor, — Dream ye that Shakespeare shall live no more? Where is the giant shot that kills Wordsworth walking the old green hills? Trample the red rose on the ground, — Keats is Beauty while earth spins round! Bind her, grind her, burn her with fire, Cast her ashes into the sea, — She shall escape, she shall aspire, She shall arise to make men free: She shall arise in a sacred scorn, Lighting the lives that are yet unborn; Spirit supernal, splendor eternal, !"