Adrienne Rich Quotes

• Lying is done with words and also with silence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lying, Words

• We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative.

  Adrienne Rich

• They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?

  Adrienne Rich

• 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

• 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

• The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

  Adrienne Rich

• The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

  Adrienne Rich

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

  Adrienne Rich

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

  Adrienne Rich

• Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

  Adrienne Rich

• 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

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

  Adrienne Rich

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

  Adrienne Rich

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

  Adrienne Rich

• Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

  Adrienne Rich

• A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

  Adrienne Rich

• 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

• We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Fear, Life, Memory

  Tags in Impermanence

• Certainly the mother serves the interests of patriarchy: she exemplifies in one person religion, social conscience, and nationalism. Institutional motherhood revives and renews all other institutions.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Mother

• The moment of change is the only poem.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change/Growth, Poetry

Adrienne Rich (46)

Birth:	16th May, 1929
Death:	27th March, 2012
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Poet

About

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

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• 1934 - R. W. Apple, Jr.
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