Quote

We have lived with violence far too long.

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
Lived
Violence
Long

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
Adrienne Rich
Image
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
Adrienne Rich
Image
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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
The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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
It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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
I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
Adrienne Rich
Image
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
Adrienne Rich