Quotes

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

The strong bond of sisterhood was a famous trait in classical art and literature about Amazons. But it was modern people who interpreted that as a sexual preference for women. That started in the 20th century. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva declared that Amazons were symbolic of lesbianism in antiquity.

Unlike settled, patriarchal societies such as classical Greece and Rome, where women stayed home to weave and mind children, the lives of nomadic steppe tribes centered on horses and archery.

Pictures of Amazons on vase paintings always show them as beautiful, active, spirited, courageous, and brave.

Anyone who's watched 'The Hunger Games', or female archers, knows that that is an absolutely physiologically ridiculous idea.

The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.

The Ephesians took great pride in their temple, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Amazons had worshipped here, and the fabulously rich King Croesus built the original temple.

The Romans had chosen Pergamon to be the capital of their new province. But by 88 B.C., most of western Asia was allied with King Mithradates, who had taken over the royal palace in Pergamon for his own headquarters.

In the seventeenth century, a French missionary in Canada reported a 'strange legend' circulating among the Hurons. They told of a monster with a 'horn' that could pierce anything, even rock.

Historical records show that Abenakis and other Natives encountered European explorers and traders in Canada looking for sources of ivory to compete with the Russian trade in Siberian fossil mammoth ivory - these traders routinely asked about ivory 'horns' and teeth.

As early as 1681-82, a group of Abenakis had accompanied the French explorer La Salle on his historic voyage down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1700, many Abenaki and Iroquois Indians spoke French and had some European education, and some were literate in French and Latin.

In April 2001, I visited Big Bone Lick State Park in Kentucky. The heaps of mastodon and other large skeletons that used to loom out of the brackish backwaters along the Ohio River here are long gone, though the occasional big bone sometimes comes to light.

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

The moment of change is the only poem.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.