Adrienne Rich Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

2. No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city. The Dream of a Common Language

3. There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

4. Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined…It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

5. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

6. ...you look at me like an emergency Diving Into the Wreck

7. [Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

8. but from here onI want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening-from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties The Dream of a Common Language

9. 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.

10. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die. Twenty-One Love Poems.

11. It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978

12. Love, our subject:we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

13. No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city. The Dream of a Common Language

14. Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence The Dream of a Common Language

15. the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we dream or scry his facein the liquid embers,the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost,the comrade/twin whose palmwould bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrowy,forked-lightning of insatiate desireIt was never the crude pestle, the blindramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creaturewith natural resources equal to our own. The Dream of a Common Language

16. We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation."(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)