Adrienne Rich quotes

Adrienne Rich was an influential American poet, essayist, and feminist. Her work explored themes of identity, social justice, and the complexities of gender and sexuality. She became a prominent voice for equality and progressive thought in contemporary literature. Here are 122 of her quotes:

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem.

Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day... The lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

Adrienne Rich

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

Adrienne Rich

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

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

Adrienne Rich

The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Adrienne Rich

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

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

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