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

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?

Adrienne Rich

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Adrienne Rich

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

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.

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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.

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Adrienne Rich

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.

Adrienne Rich

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.

Adrienne Rich

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlaw...

Adrienne Rich

The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone's body with the pain of the world's body.

Adrienne Rich

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...

Adrienne Rich

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 ...

Adrienne Rich

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.

Adrienne Rich

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan...

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