Quotes from Adrienne Rich

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.

this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you'd still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.

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.

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

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

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

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

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

Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

This is what I am: watching the spider rebuild - "patiently", they say, but I recognise in her impatience - my own- the passion to make and make again where such unmaking reigns the refusal to be a victim we have lived with violence so long Am I to go on saying for myself, for her This is my body, take it and destroy it?

She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.

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

We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

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.

I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for...many facets of our own oppression.

but from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening -from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

A language is a map of our failures

I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my pulse, loving and ordinary Send out your signals, hoist your dark scribbled flags but take my hand

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege