Rich, Adrienne

"Justice is not a destination but a direction."

"The strongest thing we have is our connection to each other."

"We create meaning through the act of naming."

"Love is the will to extend oneself for another's growth."

"The past lives in our bodies and our words."

"We are all responsible for the world we create."

"The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to be true to ourselves, that instant we begin to die."

"A lesbian continuum, I mean the term lesbian sexuality: what has historically been most written about has been omitted, thus we need to see it as a direct connection or raid on another woman's body or economy."

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

"I am writing these words to you because words have always been an action for me."

"If the look of things has changed, it is because I have willed the change, willed to see differently."

"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events."

"Truthfulness anywhere means truthfulness everywhere."

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

"We can understand the human condition by understanding the conditions under which we come to know anything."

"When we understand the power of women to change themselves, we understand the power of women to change the world."

"I need to take economic power seriously as a feminist issue."

"Poetry is not a turning away from the world; rather it is a direct confrontation with it."

"The refusal to stay marginal is not just plausible, it is necessary."

"Dreams are what literature offers us: the possible other life, the lived metaphor."

"We write in order to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection."

"It may feel strange to claim the language of the oppressor as liberation."

"A woman's silence will not protect her."

"There is no safety in silence."

"The question asked frequently of women is: are you a wife, a mother, a daughter?"

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to accept false choices offered by a many-headed world."

"The art of translation lies in knowing what to do with those parts that cannot be translated."

"I wanted words that were betrayals of my self, that could honor the splits in myself I knew to be real."

"Women have always been healers of other women, and it is time we recognized this as political work."

"If you have ever felt the pull of a place or a person, you understand the power of connection."