Famous Adrienne Rich Quotations

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"I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchical i"
by Adrienne Rich
"Lying is done with words and also with silence."
by Adrienne Rich
"The moment of change is the only poem."
by Adrienne Rich
"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."
by Adrienne Rich
"Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!"
by Adrienne Rich
"We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be revolutionary but not transformative."
by Adrienne Rich
"The ocean, whose tides respond, like women's menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins, the ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves... it is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal."
by Adrienne Rich
"The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell."
by Adrienne Rich
"We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie."
by Adrienne Rich
"The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet."
by Adrienne Rich
"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."
by Adrienne Rich
"... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all—..."
by Adrienne Rich
"...Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that ..."
by Adrienne Rich
"... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman..."
by Adrienne Rich
"A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do."
by Adrienne Rich
"Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?"
by Adrienne Rich
"children are dying my death and eating crumbs of my life."
by Adrienne Rich
"One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint..."
by Adrienne Rich
"Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed sp..."
by Adrienne Rich
"Reading while waiting for the iron to heat, writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—"
by Adrienne Rich
"The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people. To 'see the ..."
by Adrienne Rich
"The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand."
by Adrienne Rich
"The will to change begins in the body not in the mind My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every act of resistance and ..."
by Adrienne Rich
"There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to quest..."
by Adrienne Rich
"They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order...."
by Adrienne Rich
"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 ..."
by Adrienne Rich


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