black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

Adrienne Rich

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
ADRIENNE RICH

Free Hate Night Nothing Notion Play Sacred Writing
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 RICH

Cost Forcibly Heterosexuality Imposed Poverty Subliminally Woman
That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alone Identity Now Person Responsibility Speak Take Thinking Trying Warrior
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

Concentration Language ower Poetry Power Relationship Ultimate Universe
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

General History Male Merely Over Seen Themselves White Writing
Experience is always larger than language.
ADRIENNE RICH

Always Experience Language Larger
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
ADRIENNE RICH

Forever Mean Taking Talk Trip
“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
ADRIENNE RICH

Asked Clinch Condition Group Heal Human Kind Longer Milieu Support
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH

Count Few Hard Important People Way
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Absolute Country Failure Imagination People Political Scientific War
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
ADRIENNE RICH

Amnesia Liar Lying Silence Suffer Unconscious
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
ADRIENNE RICH

Able Anger Except Inward Nail Rusted Touch Women
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

Breaking Comprise Compulsory Existence Heterosexuality Lesbian Life Male Rejection Taboo
I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
ADRIENNE RICH

Generation Idea Irrelevant Raised Succumb Tech Television
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

Buyable Life Live Melodrama Memories Nostalgia Salablem Blip Screen Suspense Terrible Terror Way
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
ADRIENNE RICH

Child Children Female Identity Intense Motherhood Process Reciprocal

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Adrienne Rich Quotes