Rich, Adrienne

"I came to explore the wreckage of the fourteenth century: mostly, I came because the others came. And yet I had a book in my hand the whole way, trying to transform this itinerary into one I could believe in."

"A piece of living history, a document of the oppressed, a weapon of the revolution."

"When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But each time we speak, we build roads between each other."

"The decision to feed the world is the real decision. Food is first a product of the human relationship to the earth."

"I believe that what we are struggling with, what we have to come to terms with in America, is the fact that we are not a white country."

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to accept others' versions of who you are and what you might become."

"The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who are deaf to its language."

"An honorable human relationship—that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word 'love'—is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved."

"I wanted to move through the world as a conscious being, alert, alive to complexity and paradox."

"Poetry is the language closest to the truth of our emotional and spiritual experience."

"There is no such thing as a simple act."

"I am not a spokesperson. I am a poet."

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

"Vision is the disciplined gift of accurate naming."

"We must learn to examine our lives in the context of collective experience."

"Love is not enough. In fact it is a place of terrible danger."

"Language is power, life and instrument of culture, the instrument of domination and liberation."

"Patriarchal thought has limited women to body, to immanence, to matter, to 'nature.'"

"The moment we begin to feel deeply, all becomes music."

"Your silence will not protect you."

"A lesbian continuum is a place-and-time of electric potentiality."

"I need to write for the still-unborn generations."

"The unconscious is where our true desires and knowledge live."

"To understand means to have to act."

"Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of her own."

"The will to change begins with the recognition of ourselves."

"Thought cannot be forbidden for long without severe psychological damage."

"Woman may have been the primary aggressor in the struggle for power with men, not man."

"Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table."

"These are the connections that the conservative male world has tried to separate and to obscure."