Quotes About Identity

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child's mother or some man's wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you'd still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.

The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters

We write from the marrow of our bones.

in every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling

I did not then understand that we—the women of that academic community—as in so many middle-class communities of the period—were expected to fill both the part of the Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess, and nurse. I only sensed that there were false distractions sucking at me, and I wanted desperately to strip my life down to what was essential. June

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity. Yet from birth* in most homes and social groups, we teach children that only certain possibilities within them are livable; we teach them to hear only certain voices inside themselves, to feel only what we believe they ought to feel, to recognize only certain others as human.

You are every woman I ever loved and disavowed.

The mother I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.

She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.

The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar My roots are not my chains And I to you:   Whose hands have grown through mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who? But yours was the one, the only eye assumed Did we turn each other into liars? holding hands with each others' chains?

Some ideas are not really new but keep having to be affirmed from the ground up, over and over. One of these is the apparently simple idea that women are as intrinsically human as men, that neither women nor men are merely the enlargement of a contact sheet of genetic encoding, biological givens. Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather, our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around us.

I do not know who I was when I did those things or who I said I was or whether I willed to feel what I had read about or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things

With whom do you believe your lot is cast? From where does your strength come? I think somehow, somewhere every poem of mine must repeat those questions which are not the same. There is a whom , a where that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given in the beginning we grasp whatever we can to survive

The living, politicized woman claims to be a person whether she is attached to a family or not, whether she is attached to a man or not, whether she is a mother or not.

The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done or hiding from power in her love like a man I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence

She is here because no-one else was there when worn-to-skeleton her enemy died. Her love. Her twin. Marghanita dreamed the intravenous, the intensive the stainless steel before she ever saw them. She's not practical, you know, they used to say. She's the artist, she got away.