black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternatives Challenges Experience Imagination Imagine Question
An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Delicate Honorable Human Love People Process Relationship Self Truth Two Violent
There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
ADRIENNE RICH

Complexity Increasing One System Thing Truth
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
ADRIENNE RICH

Life Live Poet Poetry Remember Taught
An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Delicate Honorable Human Involved Person Process Relationship Terrifying Truth Violent
Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Abortion Deep Desperate First Herself Violence Woman
Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Description Language Old Transform
It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
ADRIENNE RICH

Destructiveness Dominated Male Refusal Self Society
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
ADRIENNE RICH

Healing Making One Space Tell Truth Woman
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 RICH

Gay Organized Poetry Priestly Profession Religion Talking Uncomfortable Use
A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Between Bodies Inside Knowledge Month Preverbal Subliminal Subversive
To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
ADRIENNE RICH

Brotherhood Denying Law Less Man Nobel Prize Self Sister tenure Winning Woman
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH

Liquid Poetry Stone Voice Wear Writing
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICH

Important Long Optimism Pessimism Possess Term
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
ADRIENNE RICH

Blackness Children Dawn Light Running Twilight Women
In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bringing Console Create Sustain Vision Woman

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Adrienne Rich Quotes