Adrienne Rich

...you look at me like an emergency

— Adrienne Rich

Experience is always larger than language.

— Adrienne Rich

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

— Adrienne Rich

Any woman's death diminishes me.

— Adrienne Rich

Life on the planet is born of woman.

— Adrienne Rich

“I ache, brilliantly.”

— Adrienne Rich

Strangers are an endangered species.

— Adrienne Rich

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

— Adrienne Rich

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

— Adrienne Rich

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

— Adrienne Rich

At twenty, I implicitly dissociated poetry from politics.

— Adrienne Rich

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

— Adrienne Rich

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

— Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

— Adrienne Rich

“Every act of becoming conscious (it says here in this book) is an unnatural act”

— Adrienne Rich

“In the never, still arriving, I find you again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive, makes of October an adjusted lens. The days…

— Adrienne Rich

“It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry.”

— Adrienne Rich

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror…

— Adrienne Rich

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have…

— Adrienne Rich

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and…

— Adrienne Rich

“She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.”

— Adrienne Rich

“If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction a delta springing from the…

— Adrienne Rich

“Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen…

— Adrienne Rich

“When you falter, all eludes. This is a seasick way, this almost/never touching, this drawing-off, this to-and-fro. Subtlety stalks in your eyes,…

— Adrienne Rich

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture,…

— Adrienne Rich

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the…

— Adrienne Rich

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as…

— Adrienne Rich

“Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions…

— Adrienne Rich

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction…

— Adrienne Rich

“An honorable human relationship--that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"--is a process, delicate, violent,…

— Adrienne Rich

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics:…

— Adrienne Rich

“Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled and other known and unknown there, long sweet summer evening on the tarred roof: leaned…

— Adrienne Rich

“It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or…

— Adrienne Rich

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate…

— Adrienne Rich

“Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.…

— Adrienne Rich

Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in…

— Adrienne Rich

“Birds and periodic blood. Old recapitulations. The fox, panting, fire-eyed, gone to earth in my chest. How beautiful we are, he and…

— Adrienne Rich

“In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often…

— Adrienne Rich

We've learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression. Freud rediscovered the…

— Adrienne Rich