Inspirational Quotes by Adrienne Rich — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“I dreamed I called you on the telephone”

“The pact that we made was the ordinary pact”

“Next year it would have been 20 years”

“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.”

“Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,”

“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.”

“the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,”

“Love, our subject:”

“and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us”

“but from here on”

“It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry.”

“Silence can be a plan”

“I choose to love this time for once”

“...you look at me like an emergency”

“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.”

“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”

“I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,”

“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.”

“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.”

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