Adrienne Rich on language
“Experience is always larger than language.”
More Adrienne Rich quotes
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich Strangers are an endangered species.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich I feel more helpless with you than without you.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
Adrienne RichAdrienne Rich It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne RichAdrienne 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 RichAdrienne Rich
