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Top Adrienne Rich Quotes

Browse top 54 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Adrienne Rich.

Favorite Adrienne Rich Quotes

1. "There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity." ~ Adrienne Rich
2. "Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know." ~ Adrienne Rich
3. "Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be re-examined…It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us." ~ Adrienne Rich
4. "When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever." ~ Adrienne Rich
5. "To do something very common, in my own way." ~ Adrienne Rich
6. "...you look at me like an emergency" ~ Adrienne Rich
7. "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
8. "I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings" ~ Adrienne Rich
9. "Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude." ~ Adrienne Rich
10. "A language is a map of our failures" ~ Adrienne Rich
11. "Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons." ~ Adrienne Rich
12. "And yet, protest it if we will,Some corner of the mind retainsThe medieval man, who stillKeeps watch upon those starry skeinsAnd drives us out of doors at nightTo gaze at anagrams of light." ~ Adrienne Rich
13. "and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other." ~ Adrienne Rich
14. "Love, our subject:we've trained it like ivy to our walls." ~ Adrienne Rich
15. "the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we dream or scry his facein the liquid embers,the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost,the comrade/twin whose palmwould bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrowy,forked-lightning of insatiate desireIt was never the crude pestle, the blindramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creaturewith natural resources equal to our own." ~ Adrienne Rich
16. "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 coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamedor contained within it." ~ Adrienne Rich
17. "No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we're not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love." ~ Adrienne Rich
18. "But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival." ~ Adrienne Rich
19. "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
20. "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 is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us." ~ Adrienne Rich
21. "In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence." ~ Adrienne Rich
22. "But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat." ~ Adrienne Rich
23. "For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see." ~ Adrienne Rich
24. "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 primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other." ~ Adrienne Rich
25. "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 androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision." ~ Adrienne Rich
26. "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 outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation."(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996)" ~ Adrienne Rich
27. "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 "irrational" and "hysterical." ~ Adrienne Rich
28. "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, nor inclusively "human." Feminism implies that we recognise for us, the distortion, of male-created ideologies, and that we proceed to think, and act, out of that recognition." ~ Adrienne Rich
29. "if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces." ~ Adrienne Rich
30. "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors." ~ Adrienne Rich
31. "I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die." ~ Adrienne Rich
32. "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
33. "Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement." ~ Adrienne Rich
34. "Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events." ~ Adrienne Rich
35. "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
36. "Lying is done with words and also with silence." ~ Adrienne Rich
37. "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
38. "When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her." ~ Adrienne Rich
39. "It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful." ~ Adrienne Rich
40. "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
41. "Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth." ~ Adrienne Rich
42. "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
43. "Life on the planet is born of woman." ~ Adrienne Rich
44. "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." ~ Adrienne Rich
45. "I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons." ~ Adrienne Rich
46. "The moment of change is the only poem." ~ Adrienne Rich
47. "The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell." ~ Adrienne Rich
48. "False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news." ~ Adrienne Rich
49. "Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling." ~ Adrienne Rich
50. "I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them." ~ Adrienne Rich
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Today's Quote

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality."
Author: Alfred Stieglitz

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Wit
Thin
Lit
Here
Con
King
Mean
Hum
Die
Pen
Mind
Ear
Hen
Ten
Tell
Means
Each
Use
Others
Ring
Able
Tan
Sing
Mad
Ally
Son
Break
Hey
Thinking
Desire
Sin
May
Tie
Self
Passion
Woman
Logical
Logic
Per
Exist
Complex
Poet
Call
Bodies
Cat
Less
Rain
Hang
Word
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