Quotes by "Adrienne Rich"

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

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.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.

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

We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

...you look at me like an emergency

It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry.

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand, the lost brother, the twin --- for him did we leave our mothers, deny our sisters, over and over? did we invent him, conjure him over the charring log, nights, late, in the snowbound cabin did we dream or scry his face in the liquid embers, the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us? It was never the rapist: it was the brother, lost, the comrade/twin whose palm would bear a lifeline like our own: decisive, arrowy, forked-lightning of insatiate desire It was never the crude pestle, the blind ramrod we were after: merely a fellow-creature with natural resources equal to our own.

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

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

The wave changed instantly by rock; the rock changed by the wave returning over and over.

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

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.