Poet Adrienne Rich Quotes

My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I was indeed "special." The obverse side of this, of course, was that I tried for a long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him. And then of course there were other men - writers, teachers - the Man, who was not a terror or a dream but a literary master and a master in other ways less easy to acknowledge. And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth - the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet. ~ Adrienne Rich

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around, said the poet Adrienne Rich. ~ Alfie Kohn

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

TV has created a kind of false collectivity. ~ Adrienne Rich

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being. ~ 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

I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope ~ 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

We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall. That kind of language. ~ Adrienne Rich

Streets closed, emptied by force Guns at corners
with open mouths and eyes Memory speaks:
You cannot live on me alone
you cannot live without me
I'm nothing if I'm just a roll of film
stills from a vanished world
fixed lightstreaked mute
left for another generation's
restoration and framing I can't be restored or framed
I can't be still I'm here
in your mirror pressed leg to leg beside you
intrusive inappropriate bitter flashing
with what makes me unkillable though killed ~ Adrienne Rich

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

Reality, the oppressor's tongue. ~ Adrienne Rich

The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free. ~ 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. ~ Adrienne Rich

The belief that established science and scholarship
which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making
are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture! ~ Adrienne Rich

The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar
My roots are not my chains
And I to you: Whose hands have grown
through mine? Owl-voiced I cried then: Who?
But yours was the one, the only eye assumed
Did we turn each other into liars?
holding hands with each others' chains? ~ 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

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

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

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness ~ Adrienne Rich

An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim. ~ Adrienne Rich

Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality. ~ Adrienne Rich

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.
(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996) ~ 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 [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief. ~ Adrienne Rich

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

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep. ~ 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

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude. ~ Adrienne Rich

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence ~ Adrienne Rich

What kind of beast would turn its life into words? ~ 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

In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. ~ Adrienne Rich

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

Any woman's death diminishes me. ~ Adrienne Rich

I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices. ~ Adrienne Rich

The faceless, sexless, raceless proletariat. The faceless, raceless, classless category of "all women". Both creations of white Western self-centeredness. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location. ~ Adrienne Rich

In every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling ~ Adrienne Rich

Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine ~ Adrienne Rich

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix. ~ Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich had it right. No one gives a crap about motherhood unless they can profit off it. Women are expendable and the work of childbearing, done fully, done consciously, is all-consuming. So who's gonna write about it if everyone doing it is lost forever within it? You want adventures, you want poetry and art, you want to salon it up over at Gertrude and Alice's, you'd best leave the messy all-consuming baby stuff to someone else. Birthing and nursing and rocking and distracting and socializing and cooking and washing and gardening and mending: what's that compared with bullets whizzing overhead, dazzling destructive heroics, headlines, parties, ~ Elisa Albert

I came to explore the wreck. ~ Adrienne Rich

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men ... ~ Adrienne Rich

Pictures form and dissolve in my head:
we are walking in a city
you fled, came back to and come back to still
which I saw once through winter frost
years back, before I knew you,
before I knew myself.
We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood
streets you have graven and erased in dreams:
scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth century statues.
We are holding hands so I can see
everything as you see it
I follow you into your dreams
your past, the places
none of us can explain to anyone. ~ Adrienne Rich

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing. ~ Adrienne Rich

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling. ~ Adrienne Rich

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