Adrienne Rich Quotes

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

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

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

...you look at me like an emergency

I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.

Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

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.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

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

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.
The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The medieval man, who still
Keeps watch upon those starry skeins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.