“Lying is done with words and also with silence.”
— Adrienne Rich
“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
“You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”
“Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.”
“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.”
“All new learning looks at first like chaos.”
“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”
“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”
“Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.”
“My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”
“Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.”
“When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”
“Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.”
“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.”
“Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.”
“Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
“You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.”
“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.”
“The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.”
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
“Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.”
“The moment of change is the only poem.”
“To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery...”
“The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.”
“A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.”
“What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope? – You yourself must change it.”
“If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.”
“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
“It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.”
“A language is a map of our failures.”
“The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.”
“Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.”
“Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.”
“I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.”
“I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.”
“The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.”
“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men. The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”
“Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
“We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”
“I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child.”
“What kind of beast would turn its life into words?”
“Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”
“The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.”
“No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.”
“Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.”
“It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple.”
“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.”
“I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch.”
“I came to explore the wreck.”
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