Adrienne Rich Quotes

Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

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.

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

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.

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

And yet, protest it if we will, Some corner of the mind retainsThe medieval man, who stillKeeps watch upon those starry skeinsAnd drives us out of doors at nightTo gaze at anagrams of light.

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

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

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

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

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.

Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence

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

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

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

Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts move in to shield his tears

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

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