Adrienne Rich Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

The mind's passion is all for singling out.
Obscurity has another tale to tell.

Adrienne Rich
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: 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
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

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. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

Adrienne Rich
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich
They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide... ?

Adrienne Rich
The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

Adrienne Rich
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Adrienne Rich
The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

Adrienne Rich
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

Adrienne Rich
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs...

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
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'm accused of child-death of drinking blood…
there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night…

Adrienne Rich
When someone tells me a piece of the truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can flood me with a cold, sea-sharp wash of relief.

Adrienne Rich
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

Adrienne Rich
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.

Adrienne Rich
Driving at night I feel the Milky Way Streaming above me like the graph of a cry.

Adrienne Rich
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
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, 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
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
The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we're out in a country that has no language
no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren
through gorges unexplored since dawn
whatever we do together is pure invention
the maps they gave us were out of date
by years.

Adrienne Rich
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
Two women, eye to eye
measuring each other's spirit, each other's
limitless desire,
a whole new poetry beginning here.

Adrienne Rich
To be young
Was always to live in other peoples' houses
Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,
Was ours at second-hand and not for long.

Adrienne Rich