Top 180 Adrienne Rich Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”

— Adrienne Rich

102. “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

103. “If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.”

— Adrienne Rich

104. “There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.”

— Adrienne Rich

105. “The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.”

— Adrienne Rich

106. “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

107. “To do something very common, in my own way.”

— Adrienne Rich

108. “The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs...”

— Adrienne Rich

109. “Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine.”

— Adrienne Rich

110. “Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”

— Adrienne Rich

111. “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

112. “We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.”

— Adrienne Rich

113. “War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”

— Adrienne Rich

114. “Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?”

— Adrienne Rich

115. “But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.”

— Adrienne Rich

116. “Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.”

— Adrienne Rich

117. “Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark – freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.”

— Adrienne Rich

118. “To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.”

— Adrienne Rich

119. “The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.”

— Adrienne Rich

120. “When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them.”

— Adrienne Rich

121. “Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.”

— Adrienne Rich

122. “I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.”

— Adrienne Rich

123. “The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.”

— Adrienne Rich

124. “Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.”

— Adrienne Rich

125. “Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.”

— Adrienne Rich

126. “When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.”

— Adrienne Rich

127. “Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”

— Adrienne Rich

128. “We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege.”

— Adrienne Rich

129. “When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.”

— Adrienne Rich

130. “Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.”

— Adrienne Rich

131. “I feel more helpless with you than without you.”

— Adrienne Rich

132. “Even before I wholly knew I was a lesbian, it was the lesbian in me who pursued that elusive configuration. And I believe it is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks literature that will express that energy and strength. It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman.”

— Adrienne Rich

133. “I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed.”

— Adrienne Rich

134. “I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.”

— Adrienne Rich

135. “Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.”

— Adrienne Rich

136. “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

137. “Strangers are an endangered species...”

— Adrienne Rich

138. “The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.”

— Adrienne Rich

139. “A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It’s not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument for embodied experience.”

— Adrienne Rich

140. “For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”

— Adrienne Rich

141. “One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.”

— Adrienne Rich

142. “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

143. “If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?”

— Adrienne Rich

144. “There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.”

— Adrienne Rich

145. “I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.”

— Adrienne Rich

146. “The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.”

— Adrienne Rich

147. “I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.”

— Adrienne Rich

148. “The avoidance of pain – physical or psychic – is a dangerous mechanism, which can cause us to lose touch not just with our painful sensations but with ourselves.”

— Adrienne Rich

149. “The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done or hiding from power in her love like a man I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence.”

— Adrienne Rich

150. “These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.”

— Adrienne Rich