Quotes from Adrienne Rich

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

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction a delta springing from the riverbed with its five fingers spread

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

you look at me like an emergency

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

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.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

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.

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.

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

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

The moment of change is the only poem.

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.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

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

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

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

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

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.