Adrienne Rich Quotes

A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.