Quotes from Robin Morgan

We will grow old, and older, One of us will die, and then the other. The earth itself will be impaled by sunspokes. It doesn't matter. We have been imprinted on the protons of energy herself

Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice.

If for centuries women have been accused by the Right of being dangerously radical creatures and by the Left of being dangerously conservative ones, it is because the sub-patriarchal reality in which women live is a third politics altogether.

She touched her fingertip to his wet face and brought away a tear. Amazed, he did the same. He tasted this river his own eyes had rained. "It tastes of salt!" he exclaimed. "It tastes like the sea!" "Mine too!" she laughed through her own tears, and he touched and tasted hers as well. "It's as if humans kept a sign of the mother sea in ourselves, a secret token of grief or gladness.

Hate generalises, love specifies

More curiously, why have women, suffering greater powerlessness and having greater cause for despair than the most powerless of men, avoided resorting to it on our own behalf?

What Frazer called "'the savage mind" (as if it did not think through us still) believed that the soul or essence of a creature resided in its blood. If so, then she must have appeared even more awesome, for she could bleed but retain her soul. And if he, the hero, could not, then perhaps he could make another soul bleed and so increase his own powers by that other's blood: the sacrament, the war. What she would spill for life, he would spill for death.

The irony is that while he has defined himself as a multi-faceted being, he is the impatient entity ceaselessly operating in terms of his sexuality: fearing it, seeking it, demanding it, proving it, forcing & enforcing it. His is an ejaculatory politics. Just as long ago he forgot what "self" truly could be, so he forgot what "power" really is.

If men are now afraid in daily circumstances, why then the situation must be taken seriously, attention must be paid. This also is patriarchal democracy.

Wherever she exists, she labors: her work as homemaker or mother, as prostitute or nun, is erased because it's considered natural; her work in farm, factory, or office is marginalized because it's considered unskilled, transient, or migratory.

It always happens when women become at last the subject and not the object: in order to define what women, or a group of women, or an individual woman are/is, first one must define what this subject is not. So thorough is the stereotyping, the perception of female as Other, the deliberate misinterpretation of motive, that the lies must be peeled away before a female reality can even be approached.

Bound, hobbled, silenced, battered, raped raw, starved, exhibited, bought and sold and traded, pedestaled or guttered, derided, trivialized, dismissed, erased - something there is in her that refuses it. Something there is in her that knows that she - in her poverty of flesh, knowledge, means, at times even spirit - has never lost that self.

and some feminists say it's her own fault for living with him, and she hides her dark red velvet wounds from pride, the pride of the victim, the pride of the victim at not being the perpetrator, the pride of the victim at not knowing how to withhold love.

I can hear her now, in furious rebuttal: "To say that my revolutionary struggle is a male-defined one is to trivialize me the way you feminists claim men trivialize women. You refuse to take me, my politics, my militance, seriously as my own. You treat me as a pawn in a game between men. Is this your support? Is this what you call sisterhood?" And I would reply: "Yes. Trying to name the truth, however painful, to one another is the highest respect sisterhood can offer.

Not until she, and you, and I, fully comprehend the enormity - that all issues are women's issues to be defined in women's ways and confronted in women's ways - can any of us break free and refuse to settle for rebellion within his deadly context.

Who was it you feared? Trace it, trace the fearing to a source. Not the mid-management collaborators, remember. Not those who only obey orders; just because the responsibility is everywhere doesn't mean that it's not somewhere. Trace it further, as far as you can. Scrutinize those in power behind the fear. Visualize them. There. Are women in the picture?

There, according to Paul Theroux in The Kingdom by the Sea, virtually all social duties had been assumed by women, leaving the men with few responsibilities except manliness, idleness, religion, and violence.

Squeezing power into a monodefinition is imperative for the monopolizing of it. The more "powerful" you become (in the Demon Lover's politics of Thanatos), the more rigid and abstract are the laws you forge and follow; the more "powerless" you are (in his system), the more fluid and specific are your realities.

... life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at.

Listen - life is really going on, right now, around us. Do you see it? Sometimes I lose it but if I sit still and listen, it comes back, and then I think, How funny, this is what being alive is.

In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men-but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.

It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you become really committed to winning and become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully - wild - generous, drastic in an unrationed profligacy of self.

Politics becomes a part of your life once you realize it has been all along.