Poetry Quote by Adrienne Rich — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

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

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

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

“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 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.”

“I hope that someday when I am gone, someone, somewhere, picks my soul up off of these pages and thinks, "I would have loved her.”

“Life is unbearable pain.”

“When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,”

“But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,”

“I’m so pathetically intense. I just can’t be any other way.”

“Our two souls therefore, which are one,”