Adrienne Rich Quotes

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

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

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

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

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.

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

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.

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

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.

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

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

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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

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.

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

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.