Quotes from Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! There's not a sob in my chest. Dry hearted Peer Gynt I pare away, no hero, merely a cook.

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

In the never, still arriving, I find you again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive, makes of October an adjusted lens. The days have almost no clouds left.

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

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is, or ought to be. In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.

Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity. Yet from birth* in most homes and social groups, we teach children that only certain possibilities within them are livable; we teach them to hear only certain voices inside themselves, to feel only what we believe they ought to feel, to recognize only certain others as human.

When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them.

You are every woman I ever loved and disavowed.

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

The retreat into sameness—assimilation for those who can manage it—is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.

Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?

This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.

The avoidance of pain - physical or psychic - is a dangerous mechanism, which can cause us to lose touch not just with our painful sensations but with ourselves.

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

The mother I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity, coffee and bread with sour plum jam. Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods. Lives ticking on as if.

There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.

The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar My roots are not my chains And I to you:   Whose hands have grown through mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who? But yours was the one, the only eye assumed Did we turn each other into liars? holding hands with each others' chains?

The dead" we say   as if speaking of "the people" who gave up on making history simply to get through Something dense and null   groan without echo   underground and owl-voiced I cry Who are these dead people these lovers who if ever did listen no longer answer : We :

Victories turned inside out But no surrender Cemeteries of remorse The beaten champion sobbing Ghosts move in to shield his tears

Some ideas are not really new but keep having to be affirmed from the ground up, over and over. One of these is the apparently simple idea that women are as intrinsically human as men, that neither women nor men are merely the enlargement of a contact sheet of genetic encoding, biological givens. Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather, our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around us.