black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Erected Patriarchy Terrain Woman
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
ADRIENNE RICH

Dream Effort Essential Experiment Living New Room Seek Serious Try Vision
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
ADRIENNE RICH

Air Animal Blazing Budding City Dappled Exuberantly Imagined Passion Scar Sulfuric Sycamores Tree
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
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

Citizen Class Generation Grief Magnet National Race Relationship Wall War
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alike Biological Bodies Charges Energy Giving Human Nature Nothing Probably Resonant Two
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
ADRIENNE RICH

Culture Interstices Language Lying Powerful Secret
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

Capacity Forbidden Mean Remind Something Trying Way Woman
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
ADRIENNE RICH

Desire Dream Invent Lose Success Use
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
ADRIENNE RICH

Endowed Gift Language Reason Risk Speak Survival Use
Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
ADRIENNE RICH

Affirmation Culture Desolation Great History Human Kind Magic Mattered People Period Through Violence
I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
ADRIENNE RICH

Approve Cherish Children Choice Father Made Mind Wanted
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Knew Mother Nothing Prepared Realization State Uncertain
What we see, we see and seeing is changing
ADRIENNE RICH

Changing See Seeing
Strangers are an endangered species.
ADRIENNE RICH

Endangered Species Stranger
Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cycle Feeling Process Revolutionary Running Still Thinking Transformative

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Adrienne Rich Quotes