Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.

I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows.

I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.

Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

But if what can exist does exist, is memory invention or is invention memory?

Look up. This is the season of shooting stars. Light, two thousand years old, still dazzling. Let me see your face. Your face lit up by twenty centuries.

I think therefore I am. Does that mean 'I feel therefore I'm not'? But only through feeling can I get at thinking.

Time: Change experienced and observed. Time measured by the angle of the turning earth as it rotates through its axis. The earth turning slowly on its spit under the fire of the sun.

The words come at my call but who calls whom?

Fall for me, as an apple falls, as rain falls, because you must. Use gravity to anchor your desire.

We're paying the highest tribute you can pay a man. We trust him to do right. It's that simple.

Some want more than they need, and others think they need more than they want. That's why we have so many greedy people who can't share with the poor.

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

Obama's presidency hasn't been dedicated to achieving economic growth in the short term, or about creating jobs.

If he was lost for a moment, he would dive straight back into its honey.

Avoid spending too much on one thing.

Planning anything is hopeless.

I believe that in spite of the chains we bind ourselves with, there's a primordial section of the human psyche that is still nomadic and still yearns to roam free.

Men see how you dress, and then make assumptions about your relationship potential.

The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul.