Quote

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

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
Knowledge
Plumbing
Write
Pipe
Keep
Joined
Used
Passive
Writing
Cooperation
Every
Script
Long
Scripts
Something
Create

More quotes by 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
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
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
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
Adrienne Rich
Image
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Adrienne Rich
Image
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
Adrienne Rich
Image
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
Adrienne Rich
Image
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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
Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from Transcendental Etude
Adrienne Rich
Image
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich
Image
One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
Adrienne Rich