Social Activists

"She will walk in strength like a man and never sell her body and she will nurse her babies like a woman and live in love like a garden... (Chapter Seven, p133)"

""Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth." (p322)"

"Connie got up from her kitchen table and walked slowly to the door. Either I saw him or I didn't and I'm crazy for real this time, she thought. (first lines)"

"It is not sex that gives the pleasure, but the lover. (p402)"

"Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third. (p666)"

""...you have a reciprocal nature. You understand if you want to be listened to, you should put in time listening." (p343)"

"The Movement is supposed to be for human liberation: how come the condition of women inside it is no better than outside?"

"If only I could tell each of them how much more fully I could love them now. I could give them, not the dutiful, selfish and perfunctory love of an adolescent, but an understanding love that would lighten their terrible burdens. (p253)"

"In their minds we're not human...They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us. (p255)"

"There is an attitude that has developed since about the 1890s that attempts to cast all politics and sociology out of poetry. I don't understand how anyone can seriously maintain this attitude. Actually, the attitude itself is political. Art which embodies the ideals of the ruling class in society isn't conceived as being political, and is simply judged by how well it is done. Art which contains ideas which threaten the position of that ruling class is silenced by critics: it is political, they say, and not art."

"[He] felt a controlled importance, a fine passionate honing of his attention and intellect that made him impatient with his whole previous life. (p208)"

""I used to wonder what I did wrong. But now I think that unless you grossly mistreat a child or spoil her or let her be injured, basically there's a given element in all of us, something from genes or the moment. From birth on, a child follows her own path. She learns, but she also unfolds from within." (Malkah, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

"Most of life was bizarre when she stopped to examine it. (twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

""They perceive whatever they don't control as hostile." (Avram, twenty-five: WHERE THE ELITE MEET)"

"We all of us go about, she meant to tell him but was too occupied, wanting to be wanted but unsure why anybody should bother. (twenty-two: THE PRESENT)"

"Riva said, "Most folks press the diodes of stimmies against their temples and experience some twit's tears and orgasms, while the few plug in and access information on a scale never before available. The many know less and less and the few more and more." (twenty-three: WINE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT)"

""There's too little pleasant in this nasty dying world. We all need to remember how to play, how to be children together for a little while." (Gadi, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

""Before you, the strongest feeling I knew was fear." (Yod, twenty-two: THE PRESENT)"

"They ambled around the world through the Glops, into multi enclaves, onto the tubes and the zips, far more freely and safely than people or animals could. Shira watched it wistfully. That was true freedom, she thought, something now available only to special machines. (fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)"

""One aspect of working with you, even of being with you, that I really appreciate is how hard you try to communicate. Human males don't often have that habit." (Shira to Yod, fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)"

"People had gone too far in destroying the earth, and now the earth was diminishing the number of people. (fourteen: BY THE LIGHT OF THE UNYELLOW MOON)"

""He said to me once he had given up a normal life for the cyborgs. As if he could only create life if he gave up loving and living." (Yod about Avram, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)"

"Repression brings hardening."

""Some people go on wanting [sex] as long as they live, but other people, they let it go as if it were a garment that had worn out." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)"

""I still have insomnia, but now I tell myself stories instead of counting men." (Malkah nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)"

""Nobody at twenty-eight is a success or a failure. It's too early to figure out which way the tide's moving (Malkah, fifteen: THE SAME AS ME)"

""I never wanted to belong to anybody. I only wanted to borrow them for a while, for the fun of it, the tenderness, some laughs." (Malkah, nine: REVISING THE FAMILY ALBUM)"

"Malkah's love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi's love bore both roses and thorns... (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"His body was a city, vast, filling her head. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi's imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)"

"No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)"

"Poetry was a way of keeping myself relatively sane and trying to make sense of the world I inhabited, which did not correspond to the world shown on the television we acquired the year we moved or the world that textbooks and school commended to us. The place I had grown up in was far more violent. Radical politics made sense to me. ("TOUCHED BY GINSBERG AT A (RELATIVELY) TENDER AGE")"

"The worst thing that a politician can be called is elitist-and what do we mean by that? In Iowa, Howard Dean was labeled that-a sushi eating, PBS watching, Volvo driving man-not macho enough, clearly, to win the vote of working men. But who determines the massive layoffs and the movement of corporations abroad that gut the economies of so many cities and drive families from comfort into chaos? Those are the members of the real elite ("THE MORE WE SEE, THE LESS WE KNOW")"

"It may be that television and the ever more aggressive investigative efforts of the news media have addled our ability to choose a leader wisely. Between sound bites and the seduction of images, we run a popularity contest every four years instead of an election. ("THE MORE WE SEE, THE LESS WE KNOW" , article originally from 2004)"

"This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn. (four: THROUGH THE BURNING LABYRINTH)"

"When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it, nor the stories I was told, seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them. I have been at it ever since. We need a past that leads to us. Similarly, what we imagine we are working toward does a lot to define what we will consider doable action aimed at producing the future we want and preventing the future we fear."

"Feminist utopias were created out of a hunger for what we didn’t have, at a time when change felt not only possible but probable. Utopias came from the desire to imagine a better society when we dared to do so."

"The point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road – and maybe do something about it."

""You love too hard. It occupies the center and squeezes out your strength. If you work in the center and love to the side, you will love better in the long run, Shira. You will give more gracefully, without counting, and what you get, you will enjoy." (Malkah, six: WE KNOW TOO MUCH AND TOO LITTLE)"

"Beth was looking in the mirror of her mother's vanity. The mirror had wings that opened and shut. When she was little she used to like to pull them together around her into a cave of mirrors with only a slit of light. It isn't me, isn't me. Well, who else would it be, stupid? Isn't anyone except Bride: a dress wearing a girl."

"Drifting with things is a habit it takes almost dying to break."

"No, thanks." Vida placed her hand over the top of the tulip-shaped wineglass. "No more for me. Thank you." "This is a good Vouvray. Louis in the wine store recommended it" Hank tried to nudge her hand aside with the cold dripping base of the bottle. "It's lovely. I've just had enough." She made herself smile. It felt like a date, a bad date. She had to keep smiling across the debris of the dinner for two. "The chicken was wonderful!"

"Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out."

"He's in Veecee Beecee, making those elaborate worlds people play at living in instead of worrying about the one we're all stuck with." (one: IN THE CORPORATE FORTRESS)"

"Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in."

"Utopia is born of the hunger for something better, but it relies on hope as the engine for imagining such a future. I wanted to take what I considered the most fruitful ideas of the various movements for social change and make them vivid and concrete – that was the real genesis of Woman on the Edge of Time."

"Like many women, Daria both loved her mother and prayed not to become her. Often Daria felt helpless before her mother Nina's woes, yet her first impulse was to reassure herself: I am different. I have a good and faithful husband, I have my own work, I live in a beautiful house, I like my life. Misery was not hereditary or contagious. Since the plane had taken off late from Chicago, Daria had been dividing her time between worrying about her younger daughter Tracy, who had gone away to college for the first time, and Nina, who had sounded more depressed and lonely than usual on the phone last night. Was Nina really sick? Or just unhappy?"

"Like species, couples die out or evolve."

"Good work in a field breeds interest and makes room for more good practitioners. We are not rivals but workers building something whose final shape we are not able even to fantasize."

"We are past the point where critics, whether reviewing a few poetry books in the London Times or New York Times, or for literary magazines, editors, teachers of literature and male poets themselves can pontificate about poetry and mean only the work of twenty or thirty white male writers."