Adrienne Rich Quotes

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.

~ Adrienne Rich

Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence

~ Adrienne Rich

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

~ Adrienne Rich

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

~ 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

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liarMy roots are not my chainsAnd I to you:   Whose hands have grownthrough mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who?But yours was the one, the only eye assumedDid we turn each other into liars?holding hands with each others’ chains?

~ Adrienne Rich

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

~ 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

The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking as I’ve walked beforelike a man, like a woman, in the citymy visionary anger cleansing my sightand the detailed perceptions of mercyflowering from that angerif I come into a room out of the sharp misty lightand hear them talking a dead languageif they ask me my identitywhat can I say butI am the androgyneI am the living mind you fail to describein your dead languagethe lost noun, the verb survivingonly in the infinitivethe letters of my name are written under the lidsof the newborn child

~ Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

~ Adrienne Rich

A language is a map of our failures

~ Adrienne Rich

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

~ 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

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

~ Adrienne Rich

The dead” we say   as if speakingof “the people” whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null   groanwithout echo   undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :

~ Adrienne Rich

Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts move in to shield his tears

~ Adrienne Rich

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

~ Adrienne Rich

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They’ve supplied us with pillsfor bleeding, pills for panic.Wash them down the sink.This is truth, then:dull needle groping for the spinal fluid,weak acid in the bottom of the cup,foreboding, foreboding.No one tells the truth about truth,that it’s what the fox sees from his scuffled burrow:dull-jawed, onrushingkiller, being thatinanely single-mindedwill have our skins at last.

~ Adrienne Rich

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,had certain ideals.You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,on horseback, one hand touching his gun.You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:he has access to machinery that could kill you.He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloudfrom between his unsmiling lips.And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confessto him, you are guilty of the crimeof having been forced.And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the familywhom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,his hand types out the detailsand he wants them allbut the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:he has taken down you worst momenton a machine and filed it in a file.He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.He has access to machinery that could get you put away;and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

~ Adrienne Rich

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

~ Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem.

~ Adrienne Rich

The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.

~ Adrienne Rich

Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

~ Adrienne Rich

We must use what we have to invent what we desire.

~ Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem.

~ 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

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

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

~ Adrienne Rich

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

~ Adrienne Rich

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

~ Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem.

~ Adrienne Rich