Rich, Adrienne

"A poem can be a remaking of consciousness."

"The repressed always returns, and it does so violently."

"For a poem to endure, it must be more than the expression of the writer's psyche."

"Living as we live and should live involves political choices at every instant."

"The university's task is not merely to transmit knowledge, but to transform consciousness."

"I feel like a woman who walks a thin line between two worlds."

"Art is the most intimate form of human expression."

"Resilience is not the absence of trauma, but the presence of memory."

"A common thread of experience binds women across centuries and cultures."

"The impulse to create must be as fundamental as the impulse to survive."

"We must work toward imagining and creating alternatives."

"Language is our instrument of creation."

"There is something in the female body that cannot be violated, will not be violated."

"The act of looking back, of revision, is an act of power."

"A patriarchal system is an act of imagination and imagination can be altered."

"Identity is a continuous reconstruction based on our experiences."

"The personal is the political, and the political is the personal."

"A poem is a political act in itself."

"We are made of so many different capacities."

"The act of writing is an act of witness."

"We need to be in conversation with ourselves, with each other, across time."

"Art has the power to render the abstract concrete."

"The most important thing is to keep asking questions."

"Integrity means living according to your deepest values, even when it costs."

"To be alive is to be in conversation with the forces that shape us."

"Memory, like poetry, is an act of creation and re-creation."

"The struggle for freedom is never finished."

"We must learn to read ourselves, to recognize our own script."

"The language of poetry is the language of survival."

"A vision of change requires imagination grounded in reality."