Adrienne Rich's Quotes

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

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 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.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

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

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.

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

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

Life on the planet is born of woman.

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

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

The moment of change is the only poem.

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.

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

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

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

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.

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...?