Adrienne Rich Quotes

Life on the planet is born of woman.

If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.

Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

I came to explore the wreck.