I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
Adrienne RichThe suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne RichIf you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
Adrienne RichCourage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne RichThe ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
Adrienne Rich