Quotes from Adrienne Rich

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,heavy with useless experience, richwith suspicion, rumor, fantasy,crumbling to pieces under the knife-edgeof mere fact.

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.

When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief.

Piece by piece I seemto re-enter the world.

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.

My visionary anger cleansing my sight.

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

There is a ladder.The ladder is always therehanging innocentlyclose to the side of the schooner.

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

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

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.The beak that grips her, she becomes.

I came to explore the wreck.

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 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.

I came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail.I stroke the beam of my lampslowly along the flankof something more permanentthan fish or weed.

I am the androgyne.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

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

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.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as 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 unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.