Top 180 Adrienne Rich Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even in our own lives.”

— Adrienne Rich

152. “Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.”

— Adrienne Rich

153. “I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.”

— Adrienne Rich

154. “The mother I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.”

— Adrienne Rich

155. “The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.”

— Adrienne Rich

156. “The moment the feeling enters the body is political.”

— Adrienne Rich

157. “We write from the marrow of our bones.”

— Adrienne Rich

158. “The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.”

— Adrienne Rich

159. “As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.”

— Adrienne Rich

160. “The retreat into sameness – assimilation for those who can manage it – is the most passive and debilitating of responses to political repression, economic insecurity, and a renewed open season on difference.”

— Adrienne Rich

161. “In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the other, our political perceptions are labeled “irrational” and “hysterical.”

— Adrienne Rich

162. “We have lived with violence far too long.”

— Adrienne Rich

163. “Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.”

— Adrienne Rich

164. “I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you.”

— Adrienne Rich

165. “There is nothing North Americans seem to fear so much as manipulation, probably because at some level we know that we belong to a deeply manipulative system.”

— Adrienne Rich

166. “We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.”

— Adrienne Rich

167. “Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me – it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.”

— Adrienne Rich

168. “Perhaps many white North Americans fear an overtly political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are “rationally” against; it might get us on a level we have lost touch with; undermine the safety we have built for oneselves, remind us of what is better left forgotten.”

— Adrienne Rich

169. “If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are disturbed as to how, by, and against whom wealth and political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wanting to act with others, to “do something,” you have much in common with the writers of the three essays in Manifesto.”

— Adrienne Rich

170. “I did not then understand that we – the women of that academic community – as in so many middle-class communities of the period – were expected to fill both the part of the Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess, and nurse. I only sensed that there were false distractions sucking at me, and I wanted desperately to strip my life down to what was essential. June.”

— Adrienne Rich

171. “The movement to demedicalize childbirth – to treat it as an event in a woman’s life, not as an illness – became a national one, with an increase in home births, alternative birthing practices, and the establishment of “birth centers” and “birthing rooms” in hospitals. Professional midwives were initially at the forefront of this movement, along with women who wanted to experience birth among family and friends with the greatest possible autonomy and choice in the conduct of their labor.”

— Adrienne Rich

172. “Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?”

— Adrienne Rich

173. “As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.”

— Adrienne Rich

174. “Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else’s baggage, of ceasing to translate.”

— Adrienne Rich

175. “Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.”

— Adrienne Rich

176. “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt.”

— Adrienne Rich

177. “The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else.”

— Adrienne Rich

178. “This is the oppressor’s language yet I need it to talk to you.”

— Adrienne Rich

179. “Some ideas are not really new but keep having to be affirmed from the ground up, over and over. One of these is the apparently simple idea that women are as intrinsically human as men, that neither women nor men are merely the enlargement of a contact sheet of genetic encoding, biological givens. Experience shapes us, randomness shapes us, the stars and weather, our own accommodations and rebellions, above all, the social order around us.”

— Adrienne Rich

180. “You are every woman I ever loved and disavowed.”

— Adrienne Rich

181. “The living, politicized woman claims to be a person whether she is attached to a family or not, whether she is attached to a man or not, whether she is a mother or not.”

— Adrienne Rich