Quote

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

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
Powerlessness
Biology
Keys
Ignorance

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
Image
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
Adrienne Rich