Quote

To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.

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
Self
Since
Loyal
Something
Winning
Prize
Token
Men
Law
Merely
Tokens
World
Interest
Laws
Tenure
Whether
Cost
Denying
Less
View
Nobel
Woman
Views
Sisters
Become
Least
Brotherhood

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
Adrienne Rich
Image
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Adrienne Rich
Image
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
Adrienne Rich
Image
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too political, merely oral and thus unreliable.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
Adrienne Rich
Image
When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Any woman's death diminishes me.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Adrienne Rich
Image
As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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
A language is a map of our failures
Adrienne Rich
Image
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Experience is always larger than language.
Adrienne Rich
Image
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
Image
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
Adrienne Rich