Adrienne Rich Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

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
I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed.

Adrienne Rich
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

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

Adrienne Rich
Day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

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
Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world.

Adrienne Rich
Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

Adrienne Rich
Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!

Adrienne Rich
Women have been driven mad, gaslighted, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other's sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

Adrienne Rich
The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

Adrienne Rich
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

Adrienne Rich
How have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all--
not the crimes of other, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

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
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder

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
But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.

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

Adrienne Rich
Can you remember? when we thought
the poets taught how to live?

Adrienne Rich
People are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.

Adrienne Rich
The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Adrienne Rich
Go back so far there is another language
go back far enough the language
is no longer personal.

Adrienne Rich
If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.

Adrienne Rich
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

Adrienne Rich
What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?--
You yourself must change it.

Adrienne Rich
To work and suffer is to be at home.
All else is scenery...

Adrienne Rich
There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Adrienne Rich
The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.

Adrienne Rich
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

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

Adrienne Rich