Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be. (from "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying") - Adrienne Rich

Anti-Semitism was so intrinsic as not to have a name.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?")

It's Black History Month. But this is white history. White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness-that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic. (XXI: "The distance between language and violence" p 181)