Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else brea… - Adrienne Rich

Historical amnesia is starvation of the imagination; nostalgia is the imagination's sugar rush, leaving depression and emptiness in its wake. Breaking silences, telling our tales, is not enough. We can value that process-and the courage it may require-without believing that it is an end in itself. Historical responsibility has, after all, to do with action-where we place the weight of our existences on the line, cast our lot with others, move from an individual consciousness to a collective one. But we all need to begin with the individual consciousness: How did we come to be where we are and not elsewhere?

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root-that I will never bring them whole.