black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

Adrienne Rich

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
Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
ADRIENNE RICH

Change Invitation Live Threat
When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Looking Mirror Nothing Someone Speak Teacher World
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
Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
ADRIENNE RICH

Always Asked Children Come Fear Growing Lest Menses Up Waited Waiting War Women
Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
ADRIENNE RICH

Challenge Compensatory Freedom Intellectual Nonexclusionary Political Simply Structure Studies Women
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cake Crumbling Experience Fantasy Knives Life Mind Moldering Prime Rich Rumour Suspicious Useless Wedding
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH

Assumption Drenched Know Ourselves Until
There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
ADRIENNE RICH

Artist Boundaries Bursting Channel Choiceless Creative Enormous Hunger Merely System Working
We have lived with violence far too long.
ADRIENNE RICH

Lived Long Violence
Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beauty Invisible Made Outlawed Possible Remind Represented Seem Separation Show
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alone Book Both Certainly Conscious Library Mean Page Person Poem Poet Voice Writing
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
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
ADRIENNE RICH

Arctic Deaadnededness Dead Doors Key Leftism Male Politics Revolution Tolerance Word
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cease More Something Speak Truth Unconscious Want
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

Believe Choice Help Keep Language Life Move Paralysed Respect

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Adrienne Rich Quotes