Adrienne Rich Quotes

130 Sourced Quotes

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.

Adrienne Rich
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

Adrienne Rich
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.

Adrienne Rich
Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

Adrienne Rich
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.

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
Weather abroad
and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Adrienne Rich
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.

Adrienne Rich
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Adrienne Rich
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

Adrienne Rich