Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

— Adrienne Rich

Storm Warnings The glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better than the instrument What winds are walking overhead, what zone Of gray unrest is moving across the land, I leave the book upon a pillowed chair And walk from window to closed window, watching Boughs strain against the sky And think again, as often when the air Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting, How with a single purpose time has traveled By secret currents of the discerned Into this polar realm. Weather abroad And weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction. Between foreseeing and averting change Lies all the mastery of elements Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter. Time in the hand is not control of time, Nor shattered fragments of an instrument A proof against the wind; the wind will rise, We can only close the shutters. I draw the curtains as the sky goes black And set a match to candles sheathed in glass Against the keyhole draft, the insistent whine Of weather through the unsealed aperture. This is our sole defense against the season; These are the things we have learned to do Who live in troubled regions.

— Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

The dead” we say as if speaking of “the people” who gave up on making history simply to get through Something dense and null groan without echo underground and owl-voiced I cry Whore these dead people these lovers who is ever did listen no longer answer: We :

— Adrienne Rich

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation…. Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level.

— Adrienne Rich

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

— Adrienne Rich

The I know isn’t me, you said, truth telling liar My roots are not my chains And I to you: Whose hands have grown through mine?  Owl-voiced I cried then: Who? But yours was the one, the only eye assumed Did we turn each other into liars?holding hands with each other's chains?

— Adrienne Rich

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is ‘normal,’ that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsider hood than their outsider hood as women.

— Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem.

— Adrienne Rich

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

— Adrienne Rich