1.
Menstrual blood is the only source of blood that is not traumatically induced. Yet in modern society, this is the most hidden blood, the one so rarely spoken of and almost never seen, except privately by women.
Judy Grahn
2.
What you will do matters. All you need is to do it.
Judy Grahn
3.
We lavender folk spray up, spontaneously flowering in the color we had learned as an identifying mark of our culture when it was subterranean and secret.
Judy Grahn
4.
Woman is as common as a loaf of bread, and like a loaf of bread, will rise.
Judy Grahn
5.
We cannot live in the past, nor can we re-create it. Yet as we unravel the past, the future also unfolds before us, as though they are mirrors without which neither can be seen or happen.
Judy Grahn
6.
Gay people are not in the habit of thinking of ourselves as leading our civilization, and yet we do.
Judy Grahn
7.
The shaman/priest/artist/teacher/leader does not operate for the sole benefit of herself and her kind but for the benefit of the people at large and of the universe and its patterns, as becomes what she perceives as fitting into place, into her sense of natural justice.
Judy Grahn
8.
The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time. And that is also an Indian way of seeing.
Judy Grahn
9.
Everyone wants Love to follow them / down their road; / where is it that Love wants to go?
Judy Grahn
10.
Those who believe they are ugly / objectify the rest of us.
Judy Grahn
11.
The walls of the closet are guarded by the dogs of terror, and the inside of the closet is a house of mirrors.
Judy Grahn
12.
He called her: mother of pearl, barley woman, rice provider, millet basket, corn maid, flax princess, all-maker, weef She called him: fawn, roebuck, stag, courage, thunderman, all-in-green, mountain strider, keeper of forests, my-love-rides
Judy Grahn
13.
Gay culture is far from 'marginal,' being rather 'intersectional,' the conduits between unlike beings.
Judy Grahn
14.
From my mother, a rock, / I have learned that rocks give / most of all.
Judy Grahn