Adrienne Rich Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Feminist #Connections #Force

“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

#Gay #Men #Thinking

“We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Desire #Use

“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

#People #Political #Intellectual

“We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#People #Way

“Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Destiny #Ideas #Different

“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

#Children #Names #Mind

“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

#Mean #Thinking #Two

“One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Art #Skins #Body

“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

#Art #Sex #Loneliness

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Sleep #Thinking #Monsters

“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

#Strong Women #Hard Work #Mean

“Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Silence #Overcoming #Break

“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

#Running #Thinking #Romance

“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

#Mean #Aquariums #Essentials

“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

#Inspiring #War #Believe

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

#Thinking #Two #People

“A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Desire #Might #Revolutionary

“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

#Sleep #Midnight #Enough

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

#Truth #Want #Speak

“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

#Country #War #People

“For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Mean #Way #Capacity

“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 #Wall #Years

“Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Heart #Weather #Predictions

“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

#Religious #Law #Giving

“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

#Unseen #Looks #Patterns

“Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Assumption

“We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Moving #Our Words #Privilege

“There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.”
-- Adrienne Rich

#Truth Is #Complexity

“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

#Thinking #One Direction #Rivers