Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICHIt’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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 -
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Strangers are an endangered species.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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 feel more helpless with you than without you.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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 poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
ADRIENNE RICH