446 Quotes by Adrienne Rich

...blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birthto meet again in mourning

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.

A woman in the shape of a monstera monster in the shape of a womanthe skies are full of them

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

I came to explore the wreckThe words are purposesThe words are mapsI came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail...the thing I come for:the wreck and not the story of the wreckthe thing itself and not the myth

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

Memory says: Want to do right? Don't count on me.

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.