A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Adrienne Rich

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich

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

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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.
Adrienne Rich

Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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 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

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 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 might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative.
Adrienne Rich