Adrienne Rich
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.Collection: Poetry
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.Collection: Poetry
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.Collection: Women
The moment of change is the only poem.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Society
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.Collection: Truth
We might possess every technological resource... but if 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.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.
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.
'Storm Warnings' is a poem about powerlessness - about a force so much greater than our human powers that while it can be measured and even predicted, it is beyond human control. All 'we' can do is create an interior space against the storm, an enclave of self-protection, though the winds of change till penetrate keyholes and 'unsealed apertures.'
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
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.
Life on the planet is born of woman.
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 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.
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.
Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.Collection: Threat
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.Collection: Fall
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.Collection: Inspirational
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.Collection: Teacher
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.Collection: Strong Women
The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.Collection: Important
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.Collection: Success
All new learning looks at first like chaos.Collection: Looks
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.Collection: Children
Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.Collection: Writing
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.Collection: Inspirational
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.Collection: Feelings
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.Collection: Peace
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.Collection: Long
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.Collection: Mind
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.Collection: Dream
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.Collection: Heart
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.Collection: Art
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.Collection: Assumption
The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.Collection: Damage
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessnessCollection: Ignorance
Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.Collection: Mother
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.Collection: Hate