Quotes from Adrienne Rich

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message: "You are there!".

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

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.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchical i.

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

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.