Top 100 Quotes About Adrienne Rich
#1. Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around, said the poet Adrienne Rich.
Alfie Kohn
#2. There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence.
Cheryl Strayed
#3. Each time we had a visiting writer, I asked what she thought of women and humor. By the end of the year, I had perfected my question and asked Adrienne Rich why there was so little written about women and humor. She looked at me right in the eye and said, 'You write it.' I took that as an order.
Kate Clinton
#4. These poems possess intelligence, erudition, gravitas and urgency. Serious and moving in voice and ambition, this passionately lyrical and articulate work reminds me very much of the capacious, fierce and intelligent work of Adrienne Rich.
Tony Hoagland
#5. Adrienne Rich was one of the most widely-read and influential poets of her time, a leading feminist, known especially for her politically-engaged verse. Her best-known volume, "Diving into the Wreck," won the National Book Award in 1973.
Earl Scruggs
#6. People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being. I remember reading some Adrienne Rich quote where she talks about how important it was just to watch bubbles rise in a glass.
Karen Russell
#7. ...because life is short and you too are thirsty.
Adrienne Rich
#8. I feel more helpless with you than without you.
Adrienne Rich
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence
-from Splittings
Adrienne Rich
#12. Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
#13. Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
Adrienne Rich
#14. Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Adrienne Rich
#15. I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.
Adrienne Rich
#16. The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
#17. This world gives no room
to be what we dreamt of being
Adrienne Rich
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
Adrienne Rich
#22. No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
Adrienne Rich
#23. [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
#24. 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
#25. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#26. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.
Adrienne Rich
#27. Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events
Adrienne Rich
#28. 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
#29. I used myself, let nothing use me.
Like being on a private dole,
sometimes more like cutting bricks in Egypt.
What life there was, was mine,
now and again to lay
one hand on a warm brick
and touch the sun's ghost
with economical joy.
Adrienne Rich
#30. Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
Adrienne Rich
#31. Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
Adrienne Rich
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. No one is so poor that they cannot give, and no one is so rich that they cannot receive.
Adrienne Clarkson
#35. But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
#36. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
#37. Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
Adrienne Rich
#38. It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment
that explodes in poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#39. But from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
-from A Woman Dead in Her Forties
Adrienne Rich
#40. Things take us hard, no question.
How do you make it, all the way
from here to morning? I touch
you, made of such nerve
and flare and pride and swallowed tears.
Go home. Come to bed. The skies
look in at us, stern.
And this is an old story.
Adrienne Rich
#41. Sleep comes hard. I'd rather lie awake and read.
Adrienne Rich
#43. When you falter, all eludes.
This is a seasick way,
this almost/never touching, this
drawing-off, this to-and-fro.
Subtlety stalks in your eyes,
your tongue knows what it knows.
I want your secrets - Iwillhave them out.
Seasick, I drop into the sea.
Adrienne Rich
#44. How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
Adrienne Rich
#45. Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.
Adrienne Rich
#46. But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.
Adrienne Rich
#47. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
#48. I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.
Adrienne Rich
#49. 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
#50. Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne Rich
#51. My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
Adrienne Rich
#52. What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
#53. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
Adrienne Rich
#54. It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich
#55. The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs ...
Adrienne Rich
#56. When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder
Adrienne Rich
#57. 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
#58. Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
Adrienne Rich
#59. Weather abroad
and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.
Adrienne Rich
#60. Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Adrienne Rich
#61. The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
Adrienne Rich
#62. Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
Adrienne Rich
#63. Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
Adrienne Rich
#64. Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
#65. 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
#66. There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.
Adrienne Rich
#67. Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
#68. The mother I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.
Adrienne Rich
#69. 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 mansince men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
Adrienne Rich
#70. The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich
#71. Victories turned inside out
But no surrender
Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears
Adrienne Rich
#72. The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
Adrienne Rich
#73. in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do welcome the birth of our child. There
Adrienne Rich
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
Adrienne Rich
#77. Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
Adrienne Rich
#78. The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
Adrienne Rich
#79. I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope
Adrienne Rich
#81. To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery ...
Adrienne Rich
#82. The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich
#83. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
Adrienne Rich
#84. 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
#85. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
#86. The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
Adrienne Rich
#87. This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?
Adrienne Rich
#88. Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
Adrienne Rich
#89. I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
Adrienne Rich
#91. 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
#92. It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
Adrienne Rich
#93. 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
#94. I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
Adrienne Rich
#95. She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.
Adrienne Rich
#96. Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
Adrienne Rich
#97. Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
Adrienne Rich
#98. What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?
You yourself must change it.
Adrienne Rich
#99. Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There's not a sob in my chest.
Dry hearted Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.
Adrienne Rich
#100. When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you're not in it, there's a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
Adrienne Rich
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