It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
ADRIENNE RICHSince we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH -
[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 -
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH -
How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
ADRIENNE RICH -
This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
ADRIENNE RICH -
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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 -
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICH -
“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
ADRIENNE RICH