Adrienne Rich Quotes

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites burie...

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and so...

Tongue on your words to taste you thereCouldn’t   read what youhad never written therePlayed your me...

Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts mo...

The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSo...

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liarMy roots are not my chainsAnd I to you:   Whose ...

A language is a map of our failures

We lie under the sheetafter making love, speakingof lonelinessrelieved in a bookrelived in a bookso ...

I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dapple...

Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a fo...

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our m...

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our ...

Storm WarningsThe glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better than the instrument W...

No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There ...

Was it worth while to lay— with infinite exertion—a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, ...

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new cr...

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of...

Women have been driven mad, "gaslighted," for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our ...

Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world th...

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere ...

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing viol...

An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "l...

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerab...

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the ...

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - ...

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between...

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's bo...

All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared ...

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me ear...

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.H...

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to s...

...you look at me like an emergency

The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking ...

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the dam...

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,h...

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively part...

I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism h...

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually ...

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important ...

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technologic...

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning ...

Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtai...

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technologic...

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certai...

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the ...

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate rel...

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of li...

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, lo...

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public ...

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that ri...

The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to ...

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of expl...

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something ...

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for yo...

And yet, protest it if we will,Some corner of the mind retainsThe medieval man, who stillKeeps watch...

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on liv...

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between p...

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Women's art though created in solitude wells up out of community. There is clearly both enormous...

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

Love, our subject:we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

To do something very common, in my own way.

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for yo...

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most pote...

There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing co...

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.