"Rich's letter of refusal for the National Medal for the Arts"

“Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”

“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”

“No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”

“Audio interview of Adrienne Rich, 1987, by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio”

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”

“To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.”