Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
– Adrienne Rich
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
– Adrienne Rich
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
– Adrienne Rich
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
– Adrienne Rich
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
– Adrienne Rich
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
– Adrienne Rich
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
– Adrienne Rich
Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
– Adrienne Rich
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
– Adrienne Rich
The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
– Adrienne Rich
The moment of change is the only poem.
– Adrienne Rich
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
– Adrienne Rich
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?
– Adrienne Rich
We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
– Adrienne Rich
The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
– Adrienne Rich
The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
– Adrienne Rich
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
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.