To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
ADRIENNE RICHWomen have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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 -
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH -
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
ADRIENNE RICH -
To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
ADRIENNE RICH