Quote

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

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
Born
Weren
Helping
Somehow
Live
Somewhere
Must
Touch
Tomorrow
Knowing
Dies
Help

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
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
Image
In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite) we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
Adrienne Rich
Image
An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
Adrienne Rich
Image
No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
Adrienne Rich
Image
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Image
In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
Adrienne Rich
Image
Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
Any woman's death diminishes me.
Adrienne Rich
Image
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
Adrienne Rich
Image
The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
Adrienne Rich
Image
How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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