Quotes by Adrienne Rich

About Adrienne Rich:

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will hav...

Adrienne Rich

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, in...

Adrienne Rich

Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because ...

Adrienne Rich

The Stranger Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart of the street to the river walking the rivers of the avenues feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt watching the lights turn on in the towers walking as I’ve walked...

Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

Adrienne Rich

...you look at me like an emergency

Adrienne Rich

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

Adrienne Rich

We lie under the sheet after making love, speaking of loneliness relieved in a book relived in a book so on that page the clot and fissure of it appears words of a man in pain a naked word entering the clot a hand grasping through bars: deliverance W...

Adrienne Rich

A language is a map of our failures

Adrienne Rich

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

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 a prima...

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 androcentri...

Adrienne Rich

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

Adrienne Rich

Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither objective, nor value-free,...

Adrienne Rich

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-def...

Adrienne Rich

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.

Adrienne Rich

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the other, our political perceptions are labeled "i...

Adrienne Rich

An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love" – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It i...

Adrienne Rich

Author Bio

  • NameAdrienne Rich
  • DescriptionAmerican poet, essayist and feminist
  • AliasesAdrienne Cecile Rich; Adrienne Cécile Rich
  • BornMay 16, 1929
  • DiedMarch 27, 2012
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author; Essayist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellows Program; Bollingen Prize; Lambda Literary Award; National Book Award