Adrienne Rich quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Adrienne Rich on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery ...

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.

For every bandaged wound
I'll scrape another open

Victories turned inside out
But no surrender
Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

A precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter- moon in arrest:

There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness.

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?
You yourself must change it.

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

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.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ...

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

The moment of change is the only poem.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
It will be short, it will not be simple

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence
-from Splittings

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.
The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment
that explodes in poetry.

The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

The thing I came for:
[ ... ]
the thing itself and not the myth

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

Go back so far there is another language
go back far enough the language
is no longer personal.

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

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?

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

...you look at me like an emergency

I came to explore the wreck.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes ... are maps ... I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail

A dream of tenderness
wrestles with all I know of history

Who neither touched nor spoke?
whose nape, whose finger-ends
nervelessly lied the hours away?

Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.

Passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

I feel more helpless with you than without you.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs ...

I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see.

This world gives no room
to be what we dreamt of being

Strangers are an endangered species ...

The mother I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.

You were a woman walked on a leash.
And they dropped you in the end.

But from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
-from A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

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.

If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.

In every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the
culture.

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed.

A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

Can you remember? When we thought
the poets taught how to live?

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

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.