Quotes About Adrienne Rich

how can I reconcile this passion with our modesty your calvinist heritage my girlhood frozen into forms how can I go on this mission without you you, who might have told me everything you feel is true?

There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.

I never asked you to explain that act of violence what dazed me was our ignorance of our will to hurt each other.

I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn                           between bitterness and hope

The air-conditioned car and the cool look of things outside was as refreshing as an icepack.

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.

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time for once / with all my intelligence." It seemed such a radical thought when I first read those lines when I was twenty-two—that love could rise from our deepest, most reasoned intentions rather than our strongest shadowy doubts.