“Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture’s image of what is female. (p. 204)” 

“Ordinary women attempt to change our bodies to resemble a pornographic ideal.  Ordinary women construct a false self and come to hate this self. (p. 206)” 

“It is hardly coincidental that pornography’s expression of female nothingness should erase the identity and presence of a female body and replace this with a male identity and a male presence. (p. 218)”

“And let us remember finally that we cannot choose to have both Eros and pornography; we must choose between beauty and silence. (p. 249)” 

 “One of the things that women do, it that we learn to hate our own bodies.  The culture produces images of hatred of the human body ... So we learn to hate those bodies and particularly what we hate is any idea of power in those bodies of muscular women.  We’re not supposed to be muscular.  Women are not supposed to be physically large.”

 “In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.  The pornographers are very deterministic... The culture is a human creation and we can make choices in what kind of culture we create, and culture has a profound effect on behavior.”

 “The pornographic idea of pleasure and sex is just a thin, thin veneer.  It’s so thin that sometimes you don’t even see it when you read porn.  They [pornographers] say: well, we’re just celebrating the body.  In fact when you read pornography you find very few descriptions of actual physical sex and those descriptions which exist are not at all evocative.  Madison Avenue is filled with language which is sensuously evocative, pornography is not.  The hatred of the body is the main theme of pornography.”

 “..pornography is a symptom.  It is not the honest release of hidden truth.  It is what exists to hide the truth.”
((Excerpts from: Transcript of taped interview by Karla Tonella KPFA-FM, Pacifica Radio, 1981))

 - “Many poets translate or write literary biography and criticism.  But it is rare to find an accomplished poet who is also a major nonfiction writer.”

 - “The poems are warm and suggestive, distilled with grief and passion, committed to ‘love this world as we find it’.”

 - “Her subjects range from the concrete domestic world of childhood and parenthood through the difficulties of mature love to meditations on the abstract universe in poems such as God, where she says, I am a woman/in the midst of life/with things uncovered/things undone.”