1
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.Adrienne Rich
2
I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "SplittingsAdrienne Rich
3
The phantom of the man-who-would-understand, the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers, deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log, nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we dream or scry his facein the liquid embers, the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us? It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost, the comrade/twin whose palmwould bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrowy, forked-lightning of insatiate desire It was never the crude pestle, the blindramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creaturewith natural resources equal to our own.Adrienne Rich
4
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love. Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the differencebetween love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recordershould have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recordernot merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us:this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are the forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us, against us and within us.Adrienne Rich
5
Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a life It is a presenceit has a history a form Do not confuse itwith any kind of absenceAdrienne Rich