Adrienne Rich: Trending quotes (page 2)

“I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.”

“… you look at me like an emergency”

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

“If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread”

“I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence

-from "Splittings”

“Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”

“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.”

“The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.”

“The moment of change is the only poem.”

“When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.”

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”

“Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness”

“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”

“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”

“If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”

“These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.”

“Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.”

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”