Adrienne Rich Quotations

The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

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

The moment of change is the only poem.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?

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

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women.Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

Open Air Museum. Seen from a train, stopped / As by design, to bring us / Face to face with the flag of our true country: / Violet-yellow, black-violet, / Its heart sucked by slow fire / O my America / This then your desire?

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

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

I came to explore the wreck.

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude

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

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

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

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

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

That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

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

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

Experience is always larger than language.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

TV has created a kind of false collectivity.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

Strangers are an endangered species ...

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs ...

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ...

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder

... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being