you see your parents first of all as these great looming figures who have no past, no context. They're just there and over and against you. Or they'r… - Adrienne Rich

in the women's movement, writers have so often been seen and cited as spokespeople and as leaders. My feeling is that it is the activists who move the rest of us, and that one may explain, describe, praise, deplore or whatever what is actually happening in the way of action-and that's very important, so I'm not selling the word short either when I say this-but, you don't make a political movement simply out of words.

I have been exceptionally privileged to be able to think of myself as a creative person. There is so much creativity I believe in every infant born and yet so few of us get to develop it, so few of us even get to think about having an audience for our words. So, with the kind of audience that I now have, I want to speak responsibly and for that I need teachers.

it came to me that every one of those piles of corpses, mountains of shoes and clothing had contained, simply, individuals, who had believed, as I now believed of myself, that they were intended to live out a life of some kind of meaning, that the world possessed some kind of sense and order, yet this had happened to them.