Adrienne Rich citations

Page 2

“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.”

“What kind of beast would turn its life into words?”

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”

“What we see, we see
and seeing is changing”

“To do something very common, in my own way.”

“The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.

-from "Transcendental Etude”

“The password is a flicker of an eyelash.”

“To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.”

“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day…
The lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”

“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”

“Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”

“No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”