Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Failure
Imagination
Confusion
Moral
Absolutes
War
Absolute
Like
Defeat
Despair
Response
Physical
More quotes by Adrienne Rich
The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich
Experience is always larger than language.
Adrienne Rich
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
Adrienne Rich
The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
Adrienne Rich
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
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
Adrienne Rich
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
Adrienne Rich
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
Adrienne Rich
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
Adrienne Rich
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
Adrienne Rich
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
Adrienne Rich
What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
Adrienne Rich
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
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
