It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and t...alked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The primary imperative for women who intend to assume a meaningful and decisive role in today's social change is to begin to perce...ive themselves as having an identity and personal integrity that has as strong a claim for being preserved intact as that of any other individual or group.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vice named surrealism is the immoderate and impassioned use of the stupefacient image or rather of the uncontrolled provocatio...n of the image for its own sake and for the element of unpredictable perturbation and of metamorphosis which it introduces into the domain of representation; for each image on each occasion forces you to revise the entire Universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many women are reluctant to allow men to enter their domain. They don't want men to acquire skills in what has traditionally been ...their area of competence and one of their main sources of self-esteem. So while they complain about the male's unwillingness to share in domestic duties, they continually push the male out when he moves too confidently into what has previously been their exclusive world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention--on a landsca...pe, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God--that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.... The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, o...f these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain than in any other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the s...tate of being alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the tr...ansgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »