Rich, Adrienne

"The personal is always also the universal."

"To refuse complicity is the beginning of resistance."

"The future will be what we imagine it to be."

"A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle."

"When a woman leans in to you, it is not good enough to reach for her, you have got to reach for the world."

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to accept others' definitions of your life."

"The unconscious wants to know about itself."

"I am she: I am he: I am they that is mine."

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

"We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own life."

"Poetry is the break-through into more real, still hidden, dimensions of experience."

"The most notable thing about my family was not that they were poets, but that they were ordinary."

"A change in emphasis is a change in focus."

"Women have always been healers, even when medicine denied them the role."

"Language is power, and naming is an act of power."

"The moment of change is the only poem."

"I wanted to tell her: you are not alone in the darkness."

"Patriarchy is a system, not a bunch of bad individuals."

"We are all educated by our wounds."

"Memory is an artichoke."

"Truthfulness does not require the elimination of the personal."

"I wanted to believe language could create the world we desire."

"There is a ladder of cruelty in our world."

"The drive to connect. The dream of a common language."

"Homesickness is a form of love."

"Every poem breaks a silence that had to be broken."

"Revision is the act of looking back with new eyes."

"I came to explore the wreck not for treasure but for knowledge of it."

"Patriarchal thought has limited our vision of what is possible."

"A human being is not meant to be alone."