Adrienne Rich Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

And I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

Adrienne Rich
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

Adrienne Rich
The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

Adrienne Rich
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings

Adrienne Rich
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
Much that you need has been lost... We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

Adrienne Rich
There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth' — truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

Adrienne Rich
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

Adrienne Rich
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

Adrienne Rich
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Adrienne Rich
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

Adrienne Rich
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact.

Adrienne Rich
Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,
Yankee nor Rebel.

Adrienne Rich
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.

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, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

Adrienne Rich
We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.

Adrienne Rich
Memory is a nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate.

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
Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.

Adrienne Rich
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
Now, again, poetry
violent, arcane, common,
hewn of the commonest living substance
into archway, portal, frame
I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your
ancient and stubborn poise
– as the earth trembles –
burning out from the grain

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
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes.

Adrienne Rich
How we dwelt in two worlds
the daughters and the mothers
in the kingdom of the sons.

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
The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

Adrienne Rich
Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.

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
Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.

Adrienne Rich
The mother's battle for her child — with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life — needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Adrienne Rich