Quotes About Struggle

This is what I am: watching the spider rebuild - "patiently", they say, but I recognise in her impatience - my own- the passion to make and make again where such unmaking reigns the refusal to be a victim we have lived with violence so long Am I to go on saying for myself, for her This is my body, take it and destroy it?

When I try to speak my throat is cut and, it seems, by his hand The sounds I make are prehuman, radical the telephone is always ripped-out and he sleeps on Yet always the tissue grows over, white as silk hardly a blemish maybe a hieroglyph for scream Child, no wonder you never wholly trusted your keepers

Things take us hard, no question. How do you make it, all the way from here to morning? I touch you, made of such nerve and flare and pride and swallowed tears. Go home. Come to bed. The skies look in at us, stern. And this is an old story.

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet.

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

When you falter, all eludes. This is a seasick way, this almost/never touching, this drawing-off, this to-and-fro. Subtlety stalks in your eyes, your tongue knows what it knows. I want your secrets - I will have them out. Seasick, I drop into the sea.

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

For every bandaged wound I'll scrape another   open

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

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! There's not a sob in my chest. Dry hearted Peer Gynt I pare away, no hero, merely a cook.

This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

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

If I could let you know - two women together is a work nothing in civilization ha made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine - look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

Well, she's long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge breasted and glancing through the currents, taking the light upon her at least as beautiful as any boy or helicopter, poised, still coming, her fine blades making the air wince but her cargo no promise then: delivered palpable ours.

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

Tongue on your words to taste you there Couldn't   read what you had never written there Played your message over feeling bad Played your message over it was all I had To tell me what and wherefore this is what it said: I'm tired of you asking me why I'm tired of words like the chatter of birds Give me a pass, let me just get by

Procreative choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in the nineteenth century. The struggles for that "modest Magna Carta," as Marx calls it… did not end capitalism, but they changed the relation of the workers to their own lives.

You ask me how I'm going to live the rest of my life Well, nothing is predictable with pain Did the old poets write of this? —in its odd spaces, free, many have sung and battled— But I'm already living the rest of my life not under conditions of my choosing wired into pain rider on the slow train

A dream of tenderness wrestles with all I know of history

The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else.

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.