Quote

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

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
Maps
Damage
Treasure
Came
Purpose
Words
Treasures
Done
Prevail
Purposes

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.
Adrienne Rich
Image
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day ... the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
Adrienne Rich
Image
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
Adrienne Rich
Image
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?
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
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
Adrienne Rich
Image
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
Image
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
Adrienne Rich
Image
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Image
No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
Adrienne Rich