Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

— Adrienne Rich

To do something very common, in my own way.

— Adrienne Rich

Tongue on your words to taste you there Couldn’t read what you had never written there Played your message overfeeding bad Played your message over it was all I had To tell me what and wherefore this is what it said:I’m tired of you asking me why’m tired of words like the chatter of birds Give me a pass, let me just get by

— Adrienne Rich

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

— Adrienne Rich

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.

— Adrienne Rich

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

— Adrienne Rich

Victories turned inside output no surrender Cemeteries of remorse The beaten champion sobbing Ghosts move in to shield his tears

— Adrienne Rich

Vows travailed pour l'armed, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam War, on hearing I had three sons.

— Adrienne Rich

Was it worthwhile to lay— with infinite exertion—a roof I can't live under? —All those blueprints, closings of gaps, measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading—not with indifference—about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

— Adrienne Rich

We lie under the sheet after making love, speaking of loneliness relieved in a book relived in a books on that page the clot and fissure of it appear swords of a main pain naked word entering the cloth hand grasping through bars:deliverance What happens between USHS happened for centuries we know it from literature still it happens sexual jealousyoutflung hand beating bed dryness of mouth after panting there are books that describe all this and they are useless

— Adrienne Rich