If there was widespread recognition that many people are depressed because oppression makes us miserable, and that large numbers of people are gettin… - Aurora Levins Morales

For me, the destruction of the land and the poisoning and violation of my body are inseparable, wound together on the spindle of a conquest that from the beginning was narrated as a sexual act.

("Is the racism of the women’s movement dominant in your recollection and experience of the women’s movement?") Yes, but my own ability to think about it clearly didn’t emerge until there were other women of color around. I was a new immigrant as well, and the strangeness of the United States, period, overwhelmed some of the other things that I was thinking about.

Imagine that seeking the sources of audacity in our lives, choosing to know whatever we must to find it, we discover that there is nothing to defend. Whatever the harm done to us and the real wounds of it, our scars are not treasures to be hoarded. Whatever our complicity in the deprivation of others, whatever we've allowed ourselves, in the name of comfort or fear, to accept instead of freedom, is not worth having, that injustice was already here when we were born, that it's much bigger and older than our mistakes, that claiming each other is much better than lying low.