Adrienne Rich Quotes

Experience is always larger than language.

This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.

I refuse to become a seeker for cures. Everything that has ever helped me has come through what already lay stored in me.

Anger and tenderness: my selves. And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities.

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.

Without contemplating last and late the true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

Any woman’s death diminishes me.

When did we begin to dress ourselves?

the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth.

I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

All wars are useless to the dead.

Only where there is language is there world.

Only a fact could be so dreamlike.

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.

Love only what you do, And not what you have done.

Weather abroad And weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.