The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.

I am a woman with a foot in both worlds and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.

Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead.

Smell remembers and tells the future. ... Smell is home or loneliness. Confidence or betrayal. Smell remembers.

The revolution begins at home.

Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.

But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.

Our strategy is how we cope--how we measure and weigh what is to be said and when, what is to be done and how, and to whom and towhom and to whom, daily deciding/risking who it is we can call an ally, call a friend (whatever that person's skin, sex or sexuality). We are women without a line. We are women who contradict each other.

Spirituality which inspires activism and, similarly, politics which move the spirit - which draw from the deep-seated place of our greatest longings for freedom - give meaning to our lives.

The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth

In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people.

A writer will write with or without a movement but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

The passage is through, not over, not by, not around but through.

we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.