Adrienne Rich Quotes
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.
There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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...?
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
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.
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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.
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.
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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.
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.
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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.
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.
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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.
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.
When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
A language is a map of our failures
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
