Adrienne Rich quotes - page 3

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them. (Adrienne Rich)
... you look at me like an emergency. View quote
Adrienne Rich
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls. View quote
Adrienne Rich
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other. View quote
Adrienne Rich
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city. View quote
Adrienne Rich
[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. View quote
Adrienne Rich
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. View quote
Adrienne Rich
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. View quote
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)
We must use what we have to invent what we desire. View quote
Adrienne Rich
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons. View quote
Adrienne Rich
We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever. View quote
Adrienne Rich
There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. View quote
Adrienne Rich
A language is a map of our failures. View quote
Adrienne Rich
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie. View quote
Adrienne Rich
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite) we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence. (Adrienne Rich)
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university. View quote
Adrienne Rich
No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. View quote
Adrienne Rich