Quote

I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

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
People
Ways
Suspicious
Understanding
Asian
American
Adopted
White
Tendency
Culture
African
Firsts
Tendencies
Glib
First
Indian
Exotic
Way
Spirituality
Mysticism

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
...you look at me like an emergency
Adrienne Rich
Image
The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are objectiveand value-free and that feminist studies are unscholarly, biased, and ideological dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological there is no neutrality in
Adrienne Rich
Image
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
Adrienne Rich
Image
If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
Adrienne Rich
Image
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
Image
In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
Adrienne Rich
Image
I came to explore the wreck.
Adrienne Rich
Image
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
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
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
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