Adrienne Rich Quotes

• 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

  White   People   Understanding  

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.16, W. W. Norton & Company

  3539

• in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides: Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel on ones we knew and loved Praise to life though its windows blew shut on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved Praise to life though ones we knew and loved loved it badly, too well, and not enough Praise to life though it tightened like a knot on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us Praise to life giving room and reason to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable. Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

  Adrienne Rich

  3959

• We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

  Adrienne Rich

  White  

  2434

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

  4705

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (2012). “Later Poems: Selected and New: 1971-2012: 1971–2012”, p.230, W. W. Norton & Company

  5023

• Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking   Voice  

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

  3006

• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  1978 The Dream of a Common Language,'Twenty-One Love Poems, III'.

  512

• I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking  

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

  2739

• We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  4785

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Powerful   Lying   Secret  

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution”, p.198, W. W. Norton & Company

  223

• No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

  Adrienne Rich

  4495

• A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking  

  Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" l. 26 (1963)

  416

• Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  3712

• One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art  

  2775

• 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

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  2919

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.134, W. W. Norton & Company

  2435

• In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Poemas, 1963-2000”, p.70, Editorial Renacimiento

  1169

• War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

  3351

• Strangers are an endangered species.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981”, p.40, W. W. Norton & Company

  3362

• To do something very common, in my own way.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1971). “The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970”, p.48, W. W. Norton & Company

  4800

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Lying  

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

  3617

• The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

  345

• As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

  Adrienne Rich

  1325

• Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

  Adrienne Rich

  5012

• 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

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  4879

• No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.12, W. W. Norton & Company

  1024

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.50, W. W. Norton & Company

  1241

• 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

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.38, W. W. Norton & Company

  2190

• In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.

  Adrienne Rich

  3335

• Any woman's death diminishes me.

  Adrienne Rich

  1974 Poems: Selected and New,'FromanOldHouse inAmerica,16'. See Donne 281:85.

  2383

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