Adrienne Rich Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

  Adrienne Rich

  Inspirational, Believe, Moving

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.65, W. W. Norton & Company

• 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

  Relationship, Language And Power, Concentration

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

• Lying is done with words and also with silence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Truth, Integrity, Liars

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.20, W. W. Norton & Company

• Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.

  Adrienne Rich

  Memories, Lying, Letters

• 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

  Running, Thinking, Romance

• Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

  Adrienne Rich

  Writing, Mean, Reality

• I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

  Adrienne Rich

  Children, Newborn Child, Names

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

• In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the
  culture.

  Adrienne Rich

  Powerful, Lying, Secret

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution”, p.198, W. W. Norton & Company

• I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

  Adrienne Rich

  Life, Respect, Believe

• Experience is always larger than language.

  Adrienne Rich

  Experience, Language

  1991 Interview in theAmerican Poetry Review, Jan-Feb.

• Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

  Adrienne Rich

  Real, Nuclear, Cloning

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

• When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.

  Adrienne Rich

  Notebook, Prayer, Memories

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.98, W. W. Norton & Company

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Silence, World, Violence

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.113, W. W. Norton & Company

• What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Dysfunction, Adequate

  Source: criticalflame.org

• A language is a map of our failures

  Adrienne Rich

  Maps, Language

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Poemas, 1963-2000”, p.70, Editorial Renacimiento

• Go back so far there is another language
  go back far enough the language
  is no longer personal.

  Adrienne Rich

  Language, Enough

  Adrienne Rich (2012). “Later Poems: Selected and New: 1971-2012: 1971–2012”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

• No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dream, Sleep, Rooms

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.9, W. W. Norton & Company

• In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Voice, Imagination

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• Only where there is language is there world.

  Adrienne Rich

  World, Language

  1969 Leaflets,'The Demon Lover'.

• [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

  Adrienne Rich

  Risk, Survival, Use

• The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

  Adrienne Rich

  Believe, Poetry, Trying

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978”, p.137, W. W. Norton & Company

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