Quotes from Adrienne Rich

The family coil so twisted, tight and loose anyone trying to leave has to strafe the field burn the premises down

Perhaps many white North Americans fear an overtly political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are "rationally" against; it might get us on a level we have lost touch with; undermine the safety we have built for oneselves, remind us of what is better left forgotten.

I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.

Whereever a poet is born enduring depends on the frailest of chances: Who listened to your murmuring over your little rubbish who let you be who gave you the books who let you know you were not alone

I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.

The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done or hiding from power in her love like a man I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence

We did this. Conceived of each other, conceived each other in darkness which I remember as drenched in light.           I want to call this, life.

Procreative choice is for women an equivalent of the demand for the legally limited working day which Marx saw as the great watershed for factory workers in the nineteenth century. The struggles for that "modest Magna Carta," as Marx calls it… did not end capitalism, but they changed the relation of the workers to their own lives.

You breathe upon us now through solid assertions of yourself: teaspoons, goblets, seas of carpet, a forest of old plants to be watered an old man in an adjoining room to be touched and fed. And all this universe dares us to lay a finger anywhere, save exactly as you would wish it done.

why should the wild child weep for the scientists why

You ask me how I'm going to live the rest of my life Well, nothing is predictable with pain Did the old poets write of this? —in its odd spaces, free, many have sung and battled— But I'm already living the rest of my life not under conditions of my choosing wired into pain rider on the slow train

A dream of tenderness wrestles with all I know of history

a precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter-                           moon in arrest:

The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else.

I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

There is a cop who is both prowler and father: he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers, had certain ideals.

Reading and writing aren't sacred yet people have been killed as if they were

She is here because no-one else was there when worn-to-skeleton her enemy died. Her love. Her twin. Marghanita dreamed the intravenous, the intensive the stainless steel before she ever saw them. She's not practical, you know, they used to say. She's the artist, she got away.

We find ourselves at once in prehistory and in science fiction [ Shakespeare's Sisters .

We cut the wires, find ourselves in free-fall, as if our true home were the undimensional solitudes, the rift in the Great Nebula.

I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt.

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

to understand is always an ascending movement; that is why comprehension ought always to be concrete. (one is never got out of the cave, one comes out of it.) —Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks

Marriage is lonelier than solitude