Rich, Adrienne

"The personal intimacies of any relationship reveal themselves in language."

"Women's anger has long been recognized as legitimate only when it conforms to male advantage."

"Art is that power within us which enables us to transcend the merely human."

"Knowledge itself is power."

"We create meaning through the relationships we form."

"We come to poetry because we need to, because words alone are not enough."

"A woman is her mother. That's the main thing."

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to accept others' versions of who you are."

"The unconscious wants is to be made manifest, but also to be respected as such."

"There is no such thing as a private life which doesn't affect the public one."

"An honorable human relationship is one where people can express even difficult things with directness and grace."

"Lying is done with words and also with silence."

"The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to be true to ourselves is the moment we lose the ability to be free."

"Writing is re-vision, and that's the through-line of my work."

"I need to know what you know, what you have learned from survival."

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

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

"Anger and tenderness, like light and shadow, are necessary to each other."

"We know we cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects."

"The drive to connect. It's a human imperative."

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

"Patriarchy is a system, not men."

"I wanted to choose words that even in a book meant to be glossed over, would force the reader down to look at them, to stop."

"The woman who has access to true feminine power knows that a man cannot solve her problems."

"I conceive of the poet as male or female in any case, an artist, a warrior, a lover, a sage, a prophet, a priestess, a sorcerer, one of the most essential products of a society."

"No one has ever studied the ways women use imagination and language to come into the world."

"We must begin with ourselves and our associations, but not in order to end there."

"Thought is a form of prayer."

"Memory is the only way we have of being alive."

"If the mind of the mother had been enlightened by education, the child would not cry in vain."