Quotes from Adrienne Rich

I ache, brilliantly.

we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself.

I came to explore the wreck The words are purposes The words are maps I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail... the thing I come for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth

We murmur moonwords.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope? You yourself must change it. What would it feel like to know your country was changing? You yourself must change it. Though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange What would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair?

The tentativeness, the anxiety, sometimes approaching paralysis, the confusing, described in many of these essays by intelligent, educated, "privileged" women, are themselves evidence of the damage that an be done to the creative energy by the lack of continuity, historical validation, community. Most women, it seems, have gone through their travails in a kind of spiritual isolation, alone both in the present and in ignorance of their place in any female tradition.

Freedom. It isn't once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark— freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

Whiteness did not preserve any woman from ownership by men; it did bestow a skin-deep privilege that could delude her as to her fundamental object-status as woman, unenfranchised and dominated.

To destroy the institution is not to abolish motherhood. It is to release the creation and sustenance of life into the same realm of decision, struggle, surprise, imagination, and conscious intelligence, as any other difficult, but freely chosen work.

The moment when a feeling enters the body is political.

What do I mean by commitment? I'll flash back to 1821: Shelley's claim, in "The Defence of Poetry", that "poets are the unacknowledged legislaters of the world". Piously overquoted, mostly out of context, it's taken to suggest that simply by virtue of compossing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power - in a vaue, unthreatening way. (...) He did NOT say, "Poets are the unacknowledged interior decorators of the world".

My verse works.' In two senses: as participant in political struggle, and at the personal, visceral level where it's received and its witness acknowledged. These are two responses to the question of poetry and commitment, which I take as complementary, not in opposition.

I refuse to become a seeker for cures. Everything that has ever helped me has come through what already lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong across my heart. This is from where my strength comes, even when I miss my strength even when it turns on me like a violent master.

You were a woman walked on a leash. And they dropped you in the end.

blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth to meet again in mourning

The faithful drudging child the child at the oak desk whose penmanship, hard work, style will win her prizes becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes but to change the laws of history.

It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.

As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning its government or by saying three times "As a woman my country is the whole world." -Notes Towards a Politics of Location.

The faceless, sexless, raceless proletariat. The faceless, raceless, classless category of "all women". Both creations of white Western self-centeredness. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location.

in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do welcome the birth of our child. There

I would feel [my son's] wants at such a moment fraudulent, as an attempt moreover to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself. My anger would rise

we move together like underwater plants

What happens between us has happened for centuries we know it from literature still it happens