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:

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet. (Adrienne Rich)
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The moment of change is the only poem. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Lying is done with words and also with silence. View quote
Adrienne Rich
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. View quote
Adrienne Rich
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her. View quote
Adrienne Rich
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life. View quote
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth. View quote
Adrienne Rich
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)
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. View quote
Adrienne Rich
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. View quote
Adrienne Rich
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful. View quote
Adrienne Rich
The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell. View quote
Adrienne Rich
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple. View quote
Adrienne Rich
If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread. (Adrienne Rich)
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich - Image
Photo: K. Kendall, CC BY 2.0
Occupation: American Poet
Born: May 16, 1929
Died: March 27, 2012
Quotes count: 122
Wikipedia: Adrienne Rich

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