Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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 -
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 -
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
ADRIENNE RICH -
And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.
ADRIENNE RICH






