To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we." - Adrienne Rich

Feminism has always been shaped and fired by the question How can things be other than they are? What if...? (p190 "The Soul of a Woman's College")

A new century, even a new technology, doesn't of itself produce newness. It is live human beings, looking in all directions, who will do this.

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? (p150)