Top 100 Adrienne Rich Quotes
#1. ...because life is short and you too are thirsty.
Adrienne Rich
#2. And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The medieval man, who still
Keeps watch upon those starry skeins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.
Adrienne Rich
#3. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Adrienne Rich
#4. Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
#5. Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
Adrienne Rich
#6. This world gives no room
to be what we dreamt of being
Adrienne Rich
#7. A cave of scars!
ancient, archaic wallpaper
built up, layer on layer
from the earliest, dream-white
to yesterday's, a red-black scrawl
a red mouth slowly closing
Adrienne Rich
#8. For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
Adrienne Rich
#9. Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.
Adrienne Rich
#10. Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Adrienne Rich
#11. Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
Adrienne Rich
#12. In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even in our own lives.
Adrienne Rich
#13. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.
Adrienne Rich
#14. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
#15. Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
#17. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
#18. Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
Adrienne Rich
#19. It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich
#20. It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
Adrienne Rich
#21. Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
Adrienne Rich
#22. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Adrienne Rich
#23. The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
Adrienne Rich
#24. Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
#25. The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities
Adrienne Rich
#26. There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.
Adrienne Rich
#27. The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich
#28. in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do welcome the birth of our child. There
Adrienne Rich
#29. The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
Adrienne Rich
#30. how can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty
your calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms
how can I go on this mission
without you
you, who might have told me
everything you feel is true?
Adrienne Rich
#31. I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope
Adrienne Rich
#33. A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you ... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Adrienne Rich
#34. This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
Adrienne Rich
#35. I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
Adrienne Rich
#36. 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.
Adrienne Rich
#37. She is here
because no-one else was there when worn-to-skeleton
her enemy died. Her love. Her twin.
Marghanita dreamed the intravenous, the intensive
the stainless steel
before she ever saw them. She's not practical,
you know, they used to say.
She's the artist, she got away.
Adrienne Rich
#38. She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.
Adrienne Rich
#39. By dawn you were pure electric. You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in.
Adrienne Rich
#41. Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word ... imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives.
Adrienne Rich
#42. I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.
Adrienne Rich
#43. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
Adrienne Rich
#44. You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
#45. We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
Adrienne Rich
#46. The dead" we say as if speaking
of "the people" who
gave up on making history
simply to get through
Something dense and null groan
without echo underground
and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead people these
lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer
: We :
Adrienne Rich
#47. When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
Adrienne Rich
#49. Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
Adrienne Rich
#50. We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
#51. The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.
Adrienne Rich
#52. The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
Adrienne Rich
#53. A precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter- moon in arrest:
Adrienne Rich
#54. In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
Adrienne Rich
#55. Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
Adrienne Rich
#57. The longer I live the more I mistrust
theatricality, the false glamour cast
by performance, the more I know its poverty beside
the truths we are salvaging from
the splitting-open of our lives.
-from Transcendental Etude
Adrienne Rich
#58. When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich
#59. Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
Adrienne Rich
#60. I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
Adrienne Rich
#61. The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
Adrienne Rich
#62. In every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling
Adrienne Rich
#63. They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Adrienne Rich
#64. These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
#65. What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
Adrienne Rich
#66. Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?
Adrienne Rich
#67. An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim.
Adrienne Rich
#68. Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees
Adrienne Rich
#69. They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?
Adrienne Rich
#70. The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
Adrienne Rich
#71. The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
Adrienne Rich
#72. The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
#73. We might possess every technological resource ... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
Adrienne Rich
#74. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
#75. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
that beak which grips her, she becomes.
Adrienne Rich
#76. I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
#77. Why should the wild child
weep for the scientists
why
Adrienne Rich
#78. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'
Adrienne Rich
#79. How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
#81. We stayed mute and disloyal
because we were afraid
I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things
Adrienne Rich
#82. I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.
Adrienne Rich
#83. We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Adrienne Rich
#84. I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
Adrienne Rich
#85. We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
#86. As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
Adrienne Rich
#87. Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#89. The thing I came for:
[ ... ]
the thing itself and not the myth
Adrienne Rich
#90. You were a woman walked on a leash.
And they dropped you in the end.
Adrienne Rich
#91. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth.
Adrienne Rich
#92. The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
#93. We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
Adrienne Rich
#94. and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.
Adrienne Rich
#97. If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Adrienne Rich
#98. I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
Adrienne Rich
#99. In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the
culture.
Adrienne Rich
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