“There have been times I’ve felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists.”

“Poems are difficult to silence.”

“Suppression also played another tragic role. By burying my pain, by avoiding my heartaches, I lost touch with knowing and owning what was important to me. I no longer went within, which was a scary road. If you were once attacked on a road, you make sure to avoid it. But the avoidance means you also miss out on the wild flowers when they’re blooming, the snow-capped mountains in winter, the waterfall, the deer, the beautiful people, like Tony, who walk there every day. You also miss out on knowing yourself better, on understanding what is important to you.”

“Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her.”

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

“Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did.”

“Tension, in the long run, is a more dangerous force than any feud known to man.”

“And the truth must finally lie in that which every oppressed individual feels within himself but hasn’t the courage to express”