Adrienne Rich Quotes About Silence

Quotes about: Silence

• 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

• 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 exist.

  Adrienne Rich

  Dream, Memories, Writing

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

• The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

  Adrienne Rich

  Real, Tunnels, Voice

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.78, W. W. Norton & Company

• Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.

  Adrienne Rich

  Silence, Overcoming, Break

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.76, W. W. Norton & Company

• The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Memories, Lying, Grandchildren

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.71, W. W. Norton & Company

• The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.

  Adrienne Rich

  Liars, Lying, Silence

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

• White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.

  Adrienne Rich

  Hate, Passion, White

• 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

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