Top 160 Adrienne Rich Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.”

— Adrienne Rich

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”

— Adrienne Rich

3. “Lying is done with words and also with silence.”

— Adrienne Rich

Featured in: Truth Quotes

4. “There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.”

— Adrienne Rich

5. “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.”

— Adrienne Rich

6. “When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.”

— Adrienne Rich

7. “Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.”

— Adrienne Rich

8. “Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”

— Adrienne Rich

9. “All new learning looks at first like chaos.”

— Adrienne Rich

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

10. “In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”

— Adrienne Rich

11. “Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.”

— Adrienne Rich

12. “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.”

— Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

14. “Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”

— Adrienne Rich

15. “Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness.”

— Adrienne Rich

16. “Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.”

— Adrienne Rich

17. “An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim.”

— Adrienne Rich

18. “Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.”

— Adrienne Rich

19. “You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.”

— Adrienne Rich

20. “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”

— Adrienne Rich

21. “It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism...”

— Adrienne Rich

22. “The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.”

— Adrienne Rich

23. “If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.”

— Adrienne Rich

24. “We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”

— Adrienne Rich

25. “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

26. “The moment of change is the only poem.”

— Adrienne Rich

27. “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.”

— Adrienne Rich

28. “Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.”

— Adrienne Rich

29. “To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery...”

— Adrienne Rich

30. “The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.”

— Adrienne Rich

31. “A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.”

— Adrienne Rich

32. “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.”

— Adrienne Rich

33. “The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.”

— Adrienne Rich

34. “What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope? – You yourself must change it.”

— Adrienne Rich

35. “But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.”

— Adrienne Rich

36. “I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.”

— Adrienne Rich

37. “Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.”

— Adrienne Rich

38. “The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.”

— Adrienne Rich

39. “If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”

— Adrienne Rich

40. “A language is a map of our failures.”

— Adrienne Rich

41. “Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.”

— Adrienne Rich

42. “It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.”

— Adrienne Rich

43. “When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.”

— Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

45. “When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul – and not just individual strength, but collective understanding – to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.”

— Adrienne Rich

46. “I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.”

— Adrienne Rich

47. “Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.”

— Adrienne Rich

48. “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

49. “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

50. “We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”

— Adrienne Rich