Quote

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

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
Vision
Chapters
Seeing
Text
Eyes
Entering
Looking
Cultural
Eye
Fresh
History
Direction
Women
Survival
Back
Critical
Chapter

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
We have lived with violence far too long.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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
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
Image
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
Adrienne Rich
Image
When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
Adrienne Rich
Image
The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits. The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Only where there is language is there world.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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