Adrienne Rich Quotes

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable.

Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us.

You must have love as the core; it takes courage to be willing to constantly tell the truth to each other and risk letting the relationship go.

I had the conviction that lovemaking fools you. The overpowering emotions it induces make you think you're sharing the same feelings as the other person and that they're imagining the same as you.

We keep secrets from people that we love because we're afraid of our own truth. I think sometimes we're afraid to hurt people, because you never know. I think we're afraid of what is, and what can't be.

For me, when I'm writing something really personal, I don't feel good about it. It's weird that people can connect to it and like something that came from a really crap place. You have to be quite brave to write about something that you honestly feel and think.

One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it... and the journey is always towards the other soul.

I can imagine it's hard to make a relationship last. I wouldn't know.

I think a dream date for me is some kind of fantastic conversation where you end up learning something really wonderful about a person.

I'm talking about personal stuff so I think people are on my side.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.

What does the world get from two people/who exist in a world of their own?

Then relationship happens. Before that it is just an empty name. Relationship cannot happen before the egos are gone.

Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.

In pursuing personal growth, there are issues where we can advance just so far by ourselves. At some point, our continued progress and improvement can only come about through relationships with others. Romantic love is an intense and intimate exposure to another person; if we can be who we want to be, even in that context, then our spiritual growth is exponentially expanded.

What love lays bare in me is energy.

The hardest thing to remember is that what we each really want is the truth of our lives, good or bad. Not rocking the boat is an illusion that can only be maintained by the unspoken agreement not to feel and in the long run it never really works. Let go of saving the boat and save the passengers instead.

Relationship is an art. The dream that two people create is more difficult to master than one.

It's rare in movies or even in life where somebody owns up to their needs. I guess in a relationship it's the only way it has a chance to survive it.

[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.

The intimacy that arises in listening and speaking truth is only possible if we can open to the vulnerability of our own hearts. Breathing in, contacting the life that is right here, is our first step. Once we have held ourselves with kindness, we can touch others in a vital and healing way.

Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.

I believe in a different kind of magic. The kind we make between each other.

One of the goals of a spiritual practice is self-awareness, and one of the best tools of self-awareness is simple emotional vulnerability.

In wrestling there are so many people inside and outside the ring, and it's so live, and it's this whole adrenaline thing. Whereas you move it into this more intimate thing, everything gets all quiet, someone says action, and you have to say the lines and make the words your own. It couldn't be any more different and it's weird sometimes trying to explain that to people. When I tell people that acting is much more terrifying to me than going out in front of ten thousand people, they don't quite believe it because for some reason that intimacy is just terrifying to me.