Adrienne Rich Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Fake People, Memories, Real

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  24 Copy quote

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Truth, Want Something, Speak

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Rejection, Males, Heterosexuality

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.38, W. W. Norton & Company

  23 Copy quote

• The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

  Adrienne Rich

  Two, Phrases, Movement

  27 Copy quote

• Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Grief, Love Life

  64 Copy quote

• The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dream, Struggle, Desire

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

  5 Copy quote

• No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dream, Sleep, Rooms

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.9, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.

  Adrienne Rich

  Fall, Mean, Responsibility

  24 Copy quote

• Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

  Adrienne Rich

  Body, Whatever Happens, Mines

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.30, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Feelings, Suffering

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  55 Copy quote

• Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

  Adrienne Rich

  Writing, Voice, Stones

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.104, W. W. Norton & Company

  7 Copy quote

• In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the
  culture.

  Adrienne Rich

  Powerful, Lying, Secret

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution”, p.198, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Growing Up, War

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Newborn Child, Names

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

  42 Copy quote

• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Inspiring, War, Believe

  21 Copy quote

• To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dream, Memories, Writing

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

  14 Copy quote

• Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

  Adrienne Rich

  People, Magic, Culture

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

  35 Copy quote

• Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

  Adrienne Rich

  Silence, Overcoming, Break

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.76, W. W. Norton & Company

  23 Copy quote

• The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

  Adrienne Rich

  Eyelashes, Passwords, Flicker

  21 Copy quote

• Any woman's death diminishes me.

  Adrienne Rich

  Diminish

  1974 Poems: Selected and New,'FromanOldHouse inAmerica,16'. See Donne 281:85.

  28 Copy quote

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Passion, Mind, Obscurity

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970”, p.201, W. W. Norton & Company

  11 Copy quote

• There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

  Adrienne Rich

  Truth Is, Complexity, One Thing

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Motherhood, Identity

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  7 Copy quote

• I long to create something
  that can't be used to keep us passive:
  I want to write
  a script about plumbing, how every pipe
  is joined
  to every other.

  Adrienne Rich

  Knowledge, Writing, Long

  Adrienne Rich (2016). “Collected Poems: 1950-2012”, p.405, W. W. Norton & Company

  9 Copy quote

• I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

  Adrienne Rich

  Country, Believe, Government

  Source: criticalflame.org

  12 Copy quote

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