Quote

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

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
Drop
Dust
Held
Rivers
Dried
Lips
Refused
Grief
Wears
Back
Join
Heart
River

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
Adrienne Rich
Image
When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne Rich
Image
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
Adrienne Rich
Image
If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Adrienne Rich
Image
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
Adrienne Rich
Image
The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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
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
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
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
I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
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
... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
Adrienne Rich