110+ Adrienne Rich Quotes On Powerful, Feminist And Poignant

Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was a powerful voice in the fight for gender equality and civil rights throughout her career. Her poetry was often political and personal, exploring themes of feminism, social justice, and identity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Adrienne Rich on love, powerful, feminist.

Top 10 Adrienne Rich Quotes

1. The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
2. We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
3. Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
4. 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.
5. Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
6. Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
7. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
8. 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.
9. Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
10. The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.

Adrienne Rich Short Quotes

• When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
• We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
• Any woman's death diminishes me.
• Lying is done with words and also with silence.
• The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
• Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
• I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
• How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
• Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
• False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

Adrienne Rich Quotes About Love

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

Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole. — Adrienne Rich

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings — Adrienne Rich

Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls. — Adrienne Rich

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever. — Adrienne Rich

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming. — Adrienne Rich

I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel. — Adrienne Rich

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

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. — Adrienne Rich

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power. — Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes About Powerful

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. — Adrienne Rich

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination. — Adrienne Rich

I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see. — Adrienne Rich

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform. — Adrienne Rich

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. — Adrienne Rich

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations. — Adrienne Rich

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

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. — Adrienne Rich

In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture. — Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes About Life

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence. — Adrienne Rich

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

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist. — Adrienne Rich

Life on the planet is born of woman. — Adrienne Rich

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...? — Adrienne Rich

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life. — 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 light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness. — Adrienne Rich

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it. — Adrienne Rich

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live. — Adrienne Rich

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

Adrienne Rich Quotes About Language

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child — Adrienne Rich

Only where there is language is there world. — Adrienne Rich

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language. — Adrienne Rich

We might possess every technological resource... but if 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. — 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. — Adrienne Rich

Experience is always larger than language. — Adrienne Rich

Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal. — Adrienne Rich

A language is a map of our failures — Adrienne Rich

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction. — Adrienne Rich

[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival. — Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes About Thinking

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 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

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. — Adrienne Rich

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

I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition. — Adrienne Rich

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary. — Adrienne Rich

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry. — Adrienne Rich

How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention. — Adrienne Rich

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle. — Adrienne Rich

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. — Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Famous Quotes And Sayings

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. — Adrienne Rich

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 patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included — Adrienne Rich

Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere. — Adrienne Rich

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events. — Adrienne Rich

Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short. — Adrienne Rich

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement. — Adrienne Rich

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son. — Adrienne Rich

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

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not. — Adrienne Rich

Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision. — 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 kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture. — Adrienne Rich

There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet — Adrienne Rich

The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from "Transcendental Etude — Adrienne Rich

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

The moment of change is the only poem. — Adrienne Rich

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

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash. — Adrienne Rich

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers. — Adrienne Rich

Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable. — Adrienne Rich

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

I came to explore the wreck. — Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears! — Adrienne Rich

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

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

It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism. — Adrienne Rich

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

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city. — Adrienne Rich

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time. — Adrienne Rich

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!' — Adrienne Rich

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

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

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough. — Adrienne Rich

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. — Adrienne Rich

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

When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder — Adrienne Rich

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause. — Adrienne Rich

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, 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

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

Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. — Adrienne Rich

Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers. — Adrienne Rich

... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. — Adrienne Rich

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century. — Adrienne Rich

I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind. — Adrienne Rich

The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance. — Adrienne Rich

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior. — Adrienne Rich

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs. — Adrienne Rich

Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself. — Adrienne Rich

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

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. — Adrienne Rich

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five. — Adrienne Rich

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? — Adrienne Rich

The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see. — Adrienne Rich

Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome. — Adrienne Rich

Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own. — Adrienne Rich

I feel more helpless with you than without you. — Adrienne Rich

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. — Adrienne Rich

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing. — Adrienne Rich

I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do. — 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

But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself. — Adrienne Rich

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

Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young. — Adrienne Rich

Life Lessons by Adrienne Rich

1. Adrienne Rich encourages us to be brave and to speak up for ourselves and for others. She teaches us to question the status quo, to stand up for what we believe in, and to fight for justice and equality.
2. She reminds us that our lives are valuable and that we should not be afraid to express ourselves, to be honest and vulnerable, and to live authentically.
3. Adrienne Rich encourages us to be mindful of our impact on the world and to strive for a better future for all.