446 Quotes by Adrienne Rich

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.

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

In those years, people will say, we lost trackof the meaning of we, of youwe found ourselvesreduced to Iand the whole thing becamesilly, ironic, terrible:we were trying to live a personal lifeand yes, that was the only lifewe could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plungedinto our personal weatherThey were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drovealong the shore, through the rags of fogwhere we stood, saying I

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we seek their residues wherever we can trace them

The faithful drudging child the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,hard work, style will win her prizesbecomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes but to change the laws of history.