"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way."
— Adrienne Rich

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

"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors."
— Adrienne Rich

"Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society."
— Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978)

"You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it."
— Adrienne Rich

"Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk
through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties
of our own neighborhoods.
We need to grasp our lives inseperable
from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,
and the red begonia perilously flashing
from a tenement sill six stories high,
or the long-legged young girls playing ball
in the junior highschool playground.
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."
— Adrienne Rich (Twenty One Love Poems)

"I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them."
— Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972)

"When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her."
— Adrienne Rich

"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."
— Adrienne Rich

"What we see, we see
and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain
and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar
heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse
pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet I stand

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language of the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken 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.

-- from PLANETARIUM
Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750-1848, Astronomer, Sister of William; and Others
"
— Adrienne Rich (The Will to Change)

"in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month
speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel
on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut
on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved
loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot
on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason
to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable.

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could."
— Adrienne Rich

"I feel more helpless with you than without you."
— Adrienne Rich

"...you look at me like an emergency"
— Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972)

"Power


Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power. "
— Adrienne Rich (The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977)

"That's why I want to speak to you now.

To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)

I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away."
— Adrienne Rich

"Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone."
— Adrienne Rich

"The password is a flicker of an eyelash."
— Adrienne Rich (Adrienne Rich: Selected Poems)

"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."
— Adrienne Rich (The Fact of a Door Frame)

"The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet."
— Adrienne Rich

"...Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls"
— Adrienne Rich

"the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,
the lost brother, the twin ---

for him did we leave our mothers,
deny our sisters, over and over?

did we invent him, conjure him
over the charring log,

nights, late, in the snowbound cabin
did we dream or scry his face

in the liquid embers,
the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?

It was never the rapist:
it was the brother, lost,

the comrade/twin whose palm
would bear a lifeline like our own:

decisive, arrowy,
forked-lightning of insatiate desire

It was never the crude pestle, the blind
ramrod we were after:

merely a fellow-creature
with natural resources equal to our own."
— Adrienne Rich (The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977)

"There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet"
— Adrienne Rich

"If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
"
— Adrienne Rich

"I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch"
— Adrienne Rich

"The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth."
— Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978)

"What kind of beast would turn its life into words?"
— Adrienne Rich (Twenty One Love Poems)

"and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other."
— Adrienne Rich

"If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end."
— Adrienne Rich

""There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.""
— Adrienne Rich

"Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
"
— Adrienne Rich

" I used myself, let nothing use me.
Like being on a private dole,

sometimes more like cutting bricks in Egypt.
What life there was, was mine,

now and again to lay
one hand on a warm brick

and touch the sun's ghost
with economical joy."
— Adrienne Rich

"There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity."
— Adrienne Rich

"A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
that beak which grips her, she becomes."
— Adrienne Rich

"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."
— Adrienne Rich (The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984)

"no one knows what may happen / though the books tell everything"
— Adrienne Rich