Cherrie Moraga Quotes
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The revolution begins at home.
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A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.
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Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.
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To assess the damage is a dangerous act.
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Our strategy is how we cope--how we measure and weigh what is to be said and when, what is to be done and how, and to whom and towhom and to whom, daily deciding/risking who it is we can call an ally, call a friend (whatever that person's skin, sex or sexuality). We are women without a line. We are women who contradict each other.
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I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life.
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Smell remembers and tells the future. ... Smell is home or loneliness. Confidence or betrayal. Smell remembers.
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When you are not physically starving, you have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation.
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Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead.
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Remember you live in a community. You have a responsibility to be accountable to your family and your community as well as yourself.
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We have let rhetoric do the job of poetry.
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Third World feminism is about feeding people in all their hungers.
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In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people.
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I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.
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The nationalism I seek is one that decolonizes the brown and female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth.
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Spirituality which inspires activism and, similarly, politics which move the spirit - which draw from the deep-seated place of our greatest longings for freedom - give meaning to our lives.
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The passage is through, not over, not by, not around but through.
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But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity.
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The political writer, then, is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.