Adrienne Rich Quotes

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.