Adrienne Rich

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.

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

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.It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Women's art though created in solitude wells up out of community. There is clearly both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused and an explosion of creative energy bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

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

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

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.

The moment of change is the only poem.

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,had certain ideals.You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,on horseback, one hand touching his gun.You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:he has access to machinery that could kill you.He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloudfrom between his unsmiling lips.And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,the maniac__ sperm still greasing your thighs,your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced.And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the familywhom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,his hand types out the detailsand he wants them allbut the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:he has taken down you worst momenton a machine and filed it in a file.He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.He has access to machinery that could get you put away;and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They__e supplied us with pillsfor bleeding, pills for panic.Wash them down the sink.This is truth, then:dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,weak acid in the bottom of the cup,foreboding, foreboding.No one tells the truth about truth,that it__ what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow:dull-jawed, onrushingkiller, being thatinanely single-mindedwill have our skins at last.