Quote

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

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
Doesn
Distribute
Book
Publisher
Come
Editor
Never
Select
Publishers
Editors
Poems
Chance

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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
I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
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
What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
Image
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Adrienne Rich
Image
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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
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
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
Adrienne Rich
Image
To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
Adrienne Rich
Image
One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth.
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
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
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
Image
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich