Elsa Gidlow

"If there was a problem connected with my being a lesbian, even after I became aware of it, it was the loneliness, the fact that I didn't know anybody else like me."

"We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist."

"We are returned to mystery and the power of cooperating with life—rather than, as so often now, working against it."

"the memoirs of poet Elsa Gidlow and civil rights and peace activist Barbara Deming evidenced the struggle with which so many have engaged for a lesbian identity rooted in self-esteem and dignity. In publicly affirming who they were, each encouraged the sense of continuity and tradition central to the formation of lesbian archives."

"Superficially, she suggested that she was a very respectable and demure maiden lady, but someone had put raven's blood in her mother's milk."