Life on the planet is born of woman.
ADRIENNE RICHTo conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
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 -
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
ADRIENNE RICH -
The moment of change is the only poem.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Strangers are an endangered species.
ADRIENNE RICH -
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
ADRIENNE RICH -
I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Any woman’s death diminishes me.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
ADRIENNE RICH