Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls. Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events. Adrienne Rich fake-peoplerealmemories When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. Adrienne Rich possibilitycreatingtelling-the-truth Lying is done with words and also with silence. Adrienne Rich truthliarsintegrity Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves. Adrienne Rich assumptionknows Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost? Adrienne Rich love-lifegriefart Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere. Adrienne Rich magicculturepeople Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. Adrienne Rich language-and-powerconcentrationrelationship It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple Adrienne Rich breathssimpleheart The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture. Adrienne Rich politicalintellectualpeople 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. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other. Adrienne Rich madmindreality That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. 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, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away. Adrienne Rich warriorresponsibilitythinking Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail. Adrienne Rich inwardnailsable If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread. Adrienne Rich one-directionriversthinking Any woman's death diminishes me. Adrienne Rich diminish I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included Adrienne Rich bad-assbelievechildren 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. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through. Adrienne Rich phrasesmovementtwo Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause. Adrienne Rich growing-upwarchildren Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short. Adrienne Rich responsibilitymeanfall We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. Adrienne Rich hardpeopleway Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair. Adrienne Rich numbnessdespairself
