Adrienne Rich Quotes & Sayings

The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar
My roots are not my chains
And I to you: Whose hands have grown
through mine? Owl-voiced I cried then: Who?
But yours was the one, the only eye assumed
Did we turn each other into liars?
holding hands with each others' chains? — Adrienne Rich

If you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces. — Adrienne Rich

I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc. — Adrienne Rich

Language is power ... Language can be used as a means of changing reality. — Adrienne Rich

I don't want to know
wreckage, dreck, and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly.
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.
If you had known me
once you'd still know me though in a different
light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.
But it would not surprise you
to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean
eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always
I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth ... these are not the roads
you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching
for life and death, is the same. — Adrienne Rich

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

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.
The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot. — Adrienne Rich

You were a woman walked on a leash.
And they dropped you in the end. — Adrienne Rich

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause. — Adrienne Rich

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe. — Adrienne Rich

Pictures form and dissolve in my head:
we are walking in a city
you fled, came back to and come back to still
which I saw once through winter frost
years back, before I knew you,
before I knew myself.
We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood
streets you have graven and erased in dreams:
scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth century statues.
We are holding hands so I can see
everything as you see it
I follow you into your dreams
your past, the places
none of us can explain to anyone. — Adrienne Rich

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five. — Adrienne Rich

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness — Adrienne Rich

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence — Adrienne Rich

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you're not in it, there's a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. — Adrienne Rich

We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless — Adrienne Rich

The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone's body with the pain of the world's body. — Adrienne Rich

People are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen. — Adrienne Rich

Any woman's death diminishes me. — Adrienne Rich

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

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege — Adrienne Rich

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness. — Adrienne Rich

If I cling to circumstances I could feel
not responsible. Only she who says
she did not choose, is the loser in the end. — Adrienne Rich

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world. — Adrienne Rich

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

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life. — Adrienne Rich

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

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. — Adrienne Rich

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women's movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included — Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!
There's not a sob in my chest.
Dry hearted Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook. — Adrienne Rich

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence. — Adrienne Rich

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers. — Adrienne Rich

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

If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men. — Adrienne Rich

I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary. — Adrienne Rich

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. — Adrienne Rich

The beauty of darkness
is how it lets you see. — Adrienne Rich

I came to explore the wreck. — Adrienne Rich

how can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty

your calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms

how can I go on this mission
without you

you, who might have told me
everything you feel is true? — Adrienne Rich

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

...because life is short and you too are thirsty. — Adrienne Rich

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

What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens. — Adrienne Rich

It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.
The possibility of life between us. — Adrienne Rich

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts. — Adrienne Rich

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say?
What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother
on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight out
into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of the father
facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide,
what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam?
If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the rocks
what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a bottled message
from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly defaulting into the clouds
what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the moon, the basket
with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal
packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling
ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood
all picnics are eaten on the grave? — Adrienne Rich

If I could let you know -
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization ha made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness,
the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
where the fiercest attention becomes routine
- look at the faces of those who have chosen it. — Adrienne Rich

The mother I needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born. — Adrienne Rich

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

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons. — Adrienne Rich

If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens
if we are unaware that women even have a history
we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias. — Adrienne Rich

I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well. — Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words, and also with silence. — Adrienne Rich

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

Well,
she's long about her coming, who must be
more merciless to herself than history.
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
breasted and glancing through the currents,
taking the light upon her
at least as beautiful as any boy
or helicopter,
poised, still coming,
her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours. — Adrienne Rich

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate. — Adrienne Rich

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives. — Adrienne Rich

Life on the planet is born of woman. — Adrienne Rich

An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. — Adrienne Rich

Across the freeway stands another structure
from the other side of the mirror it destroys
the logical processes of the mind, a man's thoughts
become completely disorganized, madness streaming from every throat
frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls
the steel trays, iron beds bolted to the wall, thr smells, the human waste.
To determine how men will behave once they enter prison
it is of first importance to know that prison. — Adrienne Rich

An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim. — Adrienne Rich

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail. — Adrienne Rich

The moment of change is the only poem. — Adrienne Rich

I did not then understand that we - the women of that academic community - as in so many middle-class communities of the period - were expected to fill both the part of the Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess, and nurse. I only sensed that there were false distractions sucking at me, and I wanted desperately to strip my life down to what was essential. June — Adrienne Rich

Passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. — Adrienne Rich

Strangers are an endangered species ... — Adrienne Rich

FINAL NOTATIONS
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
it will touch you through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple
you are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will — Adrienne Rich

By dawn you were pure electric. You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in. — Adrienne Rich

Every infant born is testimony to the intricacy and breadth of possibilities inherent in humanity. Yet from birth* in most homes and social groups, we teach children that only certain possibilities within them are livable; we teach them to hear only certain voices inside themselves, to feel only what we believe they ought to feel, to recognize only certain others as human. — Adrienne Rich

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer - the romantic - asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g, Tristan and Isolde, Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening') it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is 'normal,' that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. — Adrienne Rich

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them. — Adrienne Rich

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness. — Adrienne Rich

White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic. — Adrienne Rich

Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. — Adrienne Rich

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust. — Adrienne Rich

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. — Adrienne Rich

The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle. — Adrienne Rich

The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit. — Adrienne Rich

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty. — Adrienne Rich

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working. — Adrienne Rich

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

The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. — Adrienne Rich

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only? — Adrienne Rich

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 mansince men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest. — Adrienne Rich

Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now? — Adrienne Rich

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie. — Adrienne Rich

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we are simply fighting in self-defense or for our children, or when we collectively attempt to change the institutions that are making war on us and our children. — Adrienne Rich

When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
...
then I began to wonder — Adrienne Rich

I tell you, truth is, at this moment, here
burning outward through our skins.
Eternity streams through my body:
touch it with your hand and see.
Till the walls of the tunnel cave in
and the black river walks on our faces. — Adrienne Rich

When those who have the power to name and to socially construct reality choose not to see you or hear you ... when someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked in the mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul
and not just individual strength, but collective understanding
to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. — Adrienne Rich

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.
(Defy the Space That Separates, The Nation, October 7, 1996) — Adrienne Rich

- this is where I live now. If you had known me
once, you'd still know me now though in a different
light and life. This is no place you ever knew me. — Adrienne Rich

What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century. — Adrienne Rich

This world gives no room
to be what we dreamt of being — Adrienne Rich

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. — Adrienne Rich

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political — Adrienne Rich

We have lived with violence far too long. — Adrienne Rich

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. — Adrienne Rich

The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities — Adrienne Rich

What we see, we see
and seeing is changing — Adrienne Rich