Adrienne Rich Quotes

It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

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.

When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.

Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.

The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.