Quote

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

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
Fall
Recovery
Fought
Fell
Defined
Rose
Courage

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
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
Image
A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
Adrienne Rich
Image
It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
Image
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
Image
motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
Adrienne Rich
Image
To do something very common, in my own way.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
Adrienne Rich
Image
... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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
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
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process it is not an identity for all time.
Adrienne Rich