Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

She must have been very anxious about a first boy friend to fall in love with a Colgate boy

I want to get some sleep, so if there's something mind-numbingly disturbing you want to show me, can we just get it over with?

The highest intellects like the tops of mountains are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

That's the nature of women, not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

A man needs the feelings of kindness to think great than thinking of the greatness to feel good.

The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.

I like mixing or combining hobby and pleasure with work and have-tos.

The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness.

I didn't start writing in order to express myself. If anything the opposite was true. I was just as interested in negating the I and the ego.