Adrienne Rich Mean Quotations

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.