Adrienne Rich Quotes

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

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

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

"Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

Strangers are an endangered species.

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'”

To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.

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.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

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

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

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

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

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

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

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.

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

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

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

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

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

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

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

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.

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

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

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

What we see, we see and seeing is changing

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.