Quotes from Adrienne Rich

What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens.

We write from the marrow of our bones.

We stayed mute and disloyal because we were afraid I would have touched my fingers to where your breasts had been but we never did such things

the thing I came for: [...] the thing itself and not the myth

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the other, our political perceptions are labeled "irrational" and "hysterical.

When you falter, all eludes. This is a seasick way, this almost/never touching, this drawing-off, this to-and-fro. Subtlety stalks in your eyes, your tongue knows what it knows. I want your secrets - I will have them out. Seasick, I drop into the sea.

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim.

If I'm lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns' first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning from "Song

in every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling

Every act of becoming conscious (it says here in this book) is an unnatural act

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope

For every bandaged wound I'll scrape another   open

I tell you, truth is, at this moment, here burning outward through our skins. Eternity streams through my body: touch it with your hand and see. Till the walls of the tunnel cave in and the black river walks on our faces.

Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.

I did not then understand that we—the women of that academic community—as in so many middle-class communities of the period—were expected to fill both the part of the Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess, and nurse. I only sensed that there were false distractions sucking at me, and I wanted desperately to strip my life down to what was essential. June

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

how can I reconcile this passion with our modesty your calvinist heritage my girlhood frozen into forms how can I go on this mission without you you, who might have told me everything you feel is true?

And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten, his hand types out the details and he wants them all but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.