“A language is a map of our failures”

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

“I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes...are maps...I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail”

“A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”

“Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelledand other known and unknown there, long sweet summer eveningon the tarred roof:leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with starsthe Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousandsevery known constellation flinging out fiery threadsand you could distinguish all-cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of starscoherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between…It was New York, the dream-sitethe lost city the city of dreadful light…wewent striding the avenues in our fiery hairin our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways readingor pressed against other bodiesfeeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan…”

“I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child”

“Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.”