Adrienne Rich Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Adrienne Rich quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

For every bandaged wound
I'll scrape another open — Adrienne Rich

You touched me in places so deep
I wanted to ignore you. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

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

Life on the planet is born of woman. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. — Adrienne Rich

A language is a map of our failures — Adrienne Rich

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. — Adrienne Rich

If you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces. — Adrienne Rich

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

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around, said the poet Adrienne Rich. — Alfie Kohn

Strangers are an endangered species ... — Adrienne Rich

A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

What kind of beast would turn its life into words? — Adrienne Rich

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

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the
culture. — Adrienne Rich

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

Weather abroad
and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction. — Adrienne Rich

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

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain? — Adrienne Rich

Sleep comes hard. I'd rather lie awake and read. — Adrienne Rich

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

We write from the marrow of our bones. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do welcome the birth of our child. There — Adrienne Rich

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

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

We must use what we have to invent what we desire. — Adrienne Rich

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. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder — Adrienne Rich

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live. — Adrienne Rich

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

Marriage is lonelier than solitude. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

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. — Adrienne Rich

By dawn you were pure electric. You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling. — Adrienne Rich

...because life is short and you too are thirsty. — Adrienne Rich

To do something very common, in my own way. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Adrienne Rich

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude. — Adrienne Rich

The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see. — Adrienne Rich

Why should the wild child
weep for the scientists
why — Adrienne Rich

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

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

TV has created a kind of false collectivity. — Adrienne Rich

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing — Adrienne Rich

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

If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell? — Adrienne Rich

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

I feel more helpless with you than without you. — Adrienne Rich

We have lived with violence far too long. — Adrienne Rich

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
that beak which grips her, she becomes. — Adrienne Rich

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds. — Adrienne Rich

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

Experience is always larger than language. — Adrienne Rich

All new learning looks at first like chaos. — Adrienne Rich

The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness. — Adrienne Rich

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 — Adrienne Rich

A dream of tenderness
wrestles with all I know of history — Adrienne Rich

An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim. — Adrienne Rich