Quotes from Adrienne Rich

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

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.

To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.

I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

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

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

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.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

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.

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.

'Storm Warnings' is a poem about powerlessness - about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All 'we' can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change till penetrate keyholes and 'unsealed apertures.'

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.

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

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.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.