Quote

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

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
Feeling
Moment
Feelings
Moments
Political
Body
Enters
Touch

More quotes by 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
There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
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
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
Adrienne Rich
Image
A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
Adrienne Rich
Image
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
Image
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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
All new learning looks at first like chaos.
Adrienne Rich
Image
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich
Image
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
Image
One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.
Adrienne Rich
Image
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
Adrienne Rich
Image
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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
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
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from Splittings
Adrienne Rich