Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICHSince men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
ADRIENNE RICH -
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
ADRIENNE RICH -
The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
ADRIENNE RICH