Quotes from Adrienne Rich

we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held a course

By dawn you were pure electric.    You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in.

The air-conditioned car and the cool look of things outside was as refreshing as an icepack.

That light of outrage is the light of history

The moment of change is the only poem

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

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

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

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.

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

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

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

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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.

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.

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

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters that beak which grips her, she becomes.