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.
ADRIENNE RICHThat a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
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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.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
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The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
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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.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
ADRIENNE RICH






