Adrienne Rich Quotes - Page 2

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

To do something very common, in my own way.

The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null   groanwithout echo   undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :

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 a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined…It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,women at least should know the differencebetween love and death. No poison cup,no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recordershould have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recordernot merely played but should have listened to us,and could instruct those after us:this we were, this is how we tried to love,and these are the forces they had ranged against us,and these are the forces we had ranged within us,within us and against us, against us and within us.

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence

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 break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separa

No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.

...you look at me like an emergency

And yet, protest it if we will,Some corner of the mind retainsThe medieval man, who stillKeeps watch upon those starry skeinsAnd drives us out of doors at nightTo gaze at anagrams of light.

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.