Poems List

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves.

Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction, of conversation, of naming, etc. with the consequence that it immediately becomes possible for a certain amount of control to be exerted over these hitherto unconscious and uncontrollable processes.

The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualization.

Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers

We in the West do not refrain from childbirth because we are concerned about the population explosion or because we feel we cannot afford children, but because we do not like children.

Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.

I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.

Every time a man unburdens his heart to a stranger he reaffirms the love that unites humanity.

Older women can afford to agree that femininity is a charade, a matter of colored hair, ecru lace and whalebones, the kind of slap and tat that transvestites are in love with, and no more.

Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark. The pleasure they give is steady, unorgastic, reliable, deep and long-lasting. In any library in the world, I am at home, unselfconscious, still and absorbed.

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

Maybe I couldn't make it. Maybe I don't have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky ass, a sexy voice. Maybe I don't know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I'm sick of the masquerade. I'm sick of pretending eternal youth. I'm sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I'm sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I'm sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I'm sick of the Powder Room. I'm sick of pretending that some fatuous male's self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I'm sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I'm sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.

Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.

Wise men learn more from fools than fools from the wise.

An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.