Adrienne Rich Quotes

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.

One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’