Top 180 Adrienne Rich Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone’s body with the pain of the world’s body.”

— Adrienne Rich

52. “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

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

— Adrienne Rich

54. “Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”

— Adrienne Rich

55. “No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.”

— Adrienne Rich

56. “It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple.”

— Adrienne Rich

57. “It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.”

— Adrienne Rich

58. “The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.”

— Adrienne Rich

59. “In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.”

— Adrienne Rich

60. “In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.”

— Adrienne Rich

61. “The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.”

— Adrienne Rich

62. “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.”

— Adrienne Rich

63. “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?”

— Adrienne Rich

64. “Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location.”

— Adrienne Rich

65. “I came to explore the wreck.”

— Adrienne Rich

66. “Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.”

— Adrienne Rich

67. “I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.”

— Adrienne Rich

68. “Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!”

— Adrienne Rich

69. “Experience is always larger than language.”

— Adrienne Rich

70. “A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.”

— Adrienne Rich

71. “The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.”

— Adrienne Rich

72. “I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch.”

— Adrienne Rich

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

— Adrienne Rich

74. “Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.”

— Adrienne Rich

75. “We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.”

— Adrienne Rich

76. “Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.”

— Adrienne Rich

77. “The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.”

— Adrienne Rich

78. “Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

— Adrienne Rich

79. “Life on the planet is born of woman.”

— Adrienne Rich

80. “TV has created a kind of false collectivity.”

— Adrienne Rich

81. “Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.”

— Adrienne Rich

82. “What we see, we see and seeing is changing.”

— Adrienne Rich

83. “How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.”

— Adrienne Rich

84. “If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.”

— Adrienne Rich

85. “It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.”

— Adrienne Rich

86. “It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.”

— Adrienne Rich

87. “Any woman’s death diminishes me.”

— Adrienne Rich

88. “I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.”

— Adrienne Rich

89. “Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.”

— Adrienne Rich

90. “Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge no monument’s in sight but fog prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog no icon lifts a lamp here history’s breath blotting the air over Gold Mountain.”

— Adrienne Rich

91. “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

— Adrienne Rich

92. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”

— Adrienne Rich

93. “I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious.”

— Adrienne Rich

94. “False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.”

— Adrienne Rich

95. “Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.”

— Adrienne Rich

96. “Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.”

— Adrienne Rich

97. “Marriage is lonelier than solitude.”

— Adrienne Rich

98. “War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.”

— Adrienne Rich

99. “A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.”

— Adrienne Rich

100. “One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.”

— Adrienne Rich