Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, includi...ng thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing--instead of around, and down? What hope we ha...ve lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Public speaking is done in the public tongue, the national or tribal language; and the language of our tribe is the men's language.... Of course women learn it. We're not dumb. If you can tell Margaret Thatcher from Ronald Reagan, or Indira Gandhi from General Somoza, by anything they say, tell me how. This is a man's world, so it talks a man's language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the hell is nostalgia doing in a science-fiction film? With the whole universe and all the future to play in, Lucas took his ...marvelous toys and crawled under the fringed cloth on the parlor table, back into a nice safe hideyhole, along with Flash Gordon and the Cowardly Lion and Luck Skywalker and the Flying Aces and the Hitler Jugend. If there's a message there, I don't think I want to hear it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself a...s the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious abo...ut paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring ...her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of o...urs. Exploiting the apocalypse, selling the holocaust, is a pornography.... For the ultimate selling job on ultimate violence one must read those works of fiction issued by our government as manuals of civil defense, in which ... you learn that there's nothing to be afraid of if you've stockpiled lots of dried fruit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To me the "female principle" is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule b...y custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces, and breaks laws.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »