Quote

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Adrienne Rich

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Adrienne Rich
Age: 82 †
Born: 1929
Born: May 16
Died: 2012
Died: March 27
Essayist
Feminist
Peace Activist
Poet
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Adrienne Cecile Rich
Adrienne Cécile Rich
Adrienne Riche
Silence
Lying
Words
Language
Truth
Dishonesty
Also
Liars
Done
Integrity
Communication

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
Adrienne Rich
Image
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
Adrienne Rich
Image
We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
Image
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I feel more helpless with you than without you.
Adrienne Rich
Image
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
Adrienne Rich
Image
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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