Adrienne Rich quotes - page 2

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The password is a flicker of an eyelash. View quote
Adrienne Rich
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I feel more helpless with you than without you. View quote
Adrienne Rich
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude. (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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep. View quote
Adrienne Rich
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...? View quote
Adrienne Rich
Life on the planet is born of woman. View quote
Adrienne Rich
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind. View quote
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness. View quote
Adrienne Rich
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know. View quote
Adrienne Rich
To do something very common, in my own way. (Adrienne Rich)
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. View quote
Adrienne Rich
What kind of beast would turn its life into words? View quote
Adrienne Rich
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. View quote
Adrienne Rich
What we see, we see and seeing is changing. View quote
Adrienne Rich