Quotes by Adrienne Rich

“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.”

“Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from ...”

“Storm WarningsThe glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better than the instrument What winds are walking overhead, what zone Of grey unrest is moving across the land, I leave the b...”

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

“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.”

“...you look at me like an emergency”

“I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings”

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.”

“the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights...”

“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.”

“We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can bre...”

“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 Toward...”

“The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layerthe romanticasserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even ...”

“I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presen...”

“Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to ...”

“The effect of male-identification means internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of ones self and ones sex Male identification is the ac...”

“Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees”