Quotes from Adrienne Rich

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

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

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.

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

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

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

There is no 'the truth, ' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

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.

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

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

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.