Adrienne Rich Quotes (42 Quotes)

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

A year, ten years from now, I'll remember this not why, only that we were here like this, together.

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...?

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative.

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.

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.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

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

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

Life on the planet is born of woman.

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

The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.

As her sons have seen her the mother in patriarchy controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose to bear and nourish the son.

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

All wars are useless to the dead

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

Open Air Museum. Seen from a train, stopped As by design, to bring us Face to face with the flag of our true country Violet-yellow, black-violet, Its heart sucked by slow fire O my America This then your desire

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

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

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.

The moment of change is the only poem.

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

Let us return to imperfection's school.

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history it is an act of survival.

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

Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, and love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

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.

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

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

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

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

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

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.

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.

A poem can being
with a lie.

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.

It's as though she was able to convert her rage to live under this verdict of HIV into an art that was actually equal to it.

I love waking in my studio, seeing my pictures
come alive in the light.

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.

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