And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
ADRIENNE RICHThe suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH -
If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
ADRIENNE RICH -
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH -
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
ADRIENNE RICH -
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I feel more helpless with you than without you.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
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 -
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.
ADRIENNE RICH -
That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
ADRIENNE RICH






