Words matter. These are the best Adrienne Rich Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Life on the planet is born of woman.
The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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.
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?
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.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
The moment of change is the only poem.
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.
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.
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.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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.
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
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 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.