Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

We can think for ourselves and we can awaken the world to a greater consciousness.

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

Our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that's what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to "nature."

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

We need a world-wide Department of Peace.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

The world to him no longer seemed a math equation but rather a complex piece of art, a masterpiece of things not easily understood.

I am going to the USA to catch sight of a wild porcupine and to give some lectures.

A piano in the house, when I came home from school and was able to play all these different notes with all theses different sounds, I really found that fascinating.

I like to know who I'm going to be working with, so that I can think about them.

Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.

I’m not running away from my responsibilities. I’m running to them. There’s nothing negative about running away to save my life.

The canker has so eaten into the society that in many cases the only meaning of education is a knowledge of English.

I'm not the last of the old bosses. I'm the first of the new leaders.

We are not measured by the trials we meet -- only by those we overcome.

A true repentance shuns the evil itself, more than the external suffering or the shame.