Adrienne Rich Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
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.
Victories turned inside out
But no surrender
Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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.
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events
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.
Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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 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.
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.
that explodes in poetry.
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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.
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
Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
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 am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
But from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
-from A Woman Dead in Her Forties
I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening
-from A Woman Dead in Her Forties
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.
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
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.