Top 258 Quotes & Sayings by Adrienne Rich

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

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.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?

The moment of change is the only poem.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

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

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

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

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.

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

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

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

'Storm Warnings' is a poem about powerlessness - about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All 'we' can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change till penetrate keyholes and 'unsealed apertures.'

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

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.

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

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

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

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

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

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

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

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

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

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 patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, 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. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

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

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.

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple