Adrienne Rich Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

  Adrienne Rich

  Inspirational, Time, Pain

  1971 Talk delivered to Forum on'TheWomanWriter in the Twentieth Century'. Collected as'WhenWe Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision', in College English, Oct1972.

  16 Copy quote

• The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

  Adrienne Rich

  Truth, Want Something, Speak

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

  9 Copy quote

• That's why I want to speak to you now. To say: 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. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

  Adrienne Rich

  Responsibility, Warrior, Thinking

  Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

  14 Copy quote

• I feel more helpless with you than without you.

  Adrienne Rich

  Without You, Feels, Helpless

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company

  10 Copy quote

• Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

  Adrienne Rich

  Heterosexuality Is, Cost, Poverty

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.40, W. W. Norton & Company

  8 Copy quote

• Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.

  Adrienne Rich

  Eye, Survival, Vision

  Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.10, W. W. Norton & Company

  5 Copy quote

• The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn't there a difficulty of saying 'we'? You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say 'I'; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.

  Adrienne Rich

  Two, Phrases, Movement

  27 Copy quote

• Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

  Adrienne Rich

  Fake People, Memories, Real

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  24 Copy quote

• 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

  Rejection, Males, Heterosexuality

  Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.38, W. W. Norton & Company

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  42 Copy quote

• No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

  Adrienne Rich

  Inspiring, War, Believe

  21 Copy quote

• Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

  Adrienne Rich

  Children, Growing Up, War

  7 Copy quote

• My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.

  Adrienne Rich

  Children, Feelings, Suffering

  Adrienne Rich (1976). “Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution”

  55 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• Any woman's death diminishes me.

  Adrienne Rich

  Diminish

  1974 Poems: Selected and New,'FromanOldHouse inAmerica,16'. See Donne 281:85.

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• The password is a flicker of an eyelash.

  Adrienne Rich

  Eyelashes, Passwords, Flicker

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Struggle, Desire

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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine

  Adrienne Rich

  Body, Whatever Happens, Mines

  Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.30, W. W. Norton & Company

  4 Copy quote

• Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

  Adrienne Rich

  Grief, Heart, Dust

  Adrienne Rich (1971). “The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970”, p.2, W. W. Norton & Company

  9 Copy quote

• The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

  Adrienne Rich

  Passion, Mind, Obscurity

  Adrienne Rich (1995). “Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970”, p.201, W. W. Norton & Company

  11 Copy quote

• There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

  Adrienne Rich

  Truth Is, Complexity, One Thing

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

  10 Copy quote

• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Country, Believe, Government

  Source: criticalflame.org

  12 Copy quote

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