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

Categorized in : People Culture Magic

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.

Adrienne Rich

self love two

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

Adrienne Rich

recovery rose fall

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Adrienne Rich

feminist motivational inspirational

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. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.

Adrienne Rich

individual-strength mirrors teacher

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

Adrienne Rich

invitations threat

The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

Adrienne Rich

limits important culture

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

Adrienne Rich

warrior down-and inspirational

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

Adrienne Rich

inspirational believe moving

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

Adrienne Rich

chamber desire feelings

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

Adrienne Rich

strong-women hard-work mean

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

Adrienne Rich

motherhood new-relationship children

The beauty of darkness

Adrienne Rich

darkness

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

Adrienne Rich

one-woman space healing

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

Adrienne Rich

writing mean reality

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Adrienne Rich

monsters sleep thinking

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Adrienne Rich

use-it-or-lose-it dream success

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.

Adrienne Rich

ubuntu peace people

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

Adrienne Rich

age heart world

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

Adrienne Rich

dinner-table mean art

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

Adrienne Rich

two people thinking