“the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we dream or scry his facein the liquid embers,the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost,the comrade/twin whose palmwould bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrowy,forked-lightning of insatiate desireIt was never the crude pestle, the blindramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creaturewith natural resources equal to our own.”

“Origins and History of ConsciousnessIII.It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,dress, go out, drink coffee,enter a life again. It isn’t simpleto wake from sleep into the neighborhoodof one neither strange nor familiarwhom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselvesdownward hand over hand as on a rope that quiveredover the unsearched…. We did this. Conceivedof each other, conceived each other in a darknesswhich I remember as drenched in light. I want to call this, life.But I can’t call it life until we start to movebeyond this secret circle of firewhere our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wallwhere the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleepslike a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.”

“Wherever in this city, screens flickerwith pornography, with science-fiction vampires,victimized hirelings bending to the lash,we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walkthrough the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid crueltiesof our own neighborhoods.We need to grasp our lives inseperablefrom those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,and the red begonia perilously flashingfrom a tenement sill six stories high,or the long-legged young girls playing ballin the junior highschool playground.No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.”

“We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intendedand this is verbal privilege”

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.”

“We are, I am, you areby cowardice or couragethe one who find our wayback to this scenecarrying a knife, a cameraa book of mythsin whichour names do not appear.”

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.”