Adrienne Quotes & Sayings

Caring is weakness, and weakness is death. — Adrienne DeWolfe

It's not easy, though, singing upside down in a headstand on a raised platform with your unfettered breasts hitting you in the chin. — Adrienne Barbeau

She turned her can'ts into cans, and her DREAMS into plans! (Stuck on my screen, and always will be). — Adrienne Vaughan

Vous travaillez pour l'armee, madame?' (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons. — Adrienne Rich

Evil comes in all forms, Elena. Even portrays itself as light. — Adrienne Woods

Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness — Adrienne Rich

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language. — Adrienne Rich

When you are on the edge of death you are no longer a child. You understand things you couldn't even comprehend as an adult. — Adrienne Wilder

I'm a short woman with a pretty good body and large breasts - that's not what I think of as sexy. — Adrienne Barbeau

You make your own future. — Adrienne Woods

I think The 'Cheetah Girls' was originally supposed to be one film, but then it became two and three, which was a huge deal. But like all Disney franchises, they have to come to an end at some point. I was so grateful we went out with a bang. I think we died off peacefully. — Adrienne Bailon

Lucian's voice rang inside my head, loud and clear, "Move your ass, Elena, and no matter what, trust your reflexes." Relying on my clumsy butt was more like it. I'd made a joke, That was a good sign. — Adrienne Woods

Why are women always the ones who have to forgive? If you cheated on a man, he would be like, 'You're disgusting, and I want nothing to do with you.' But women, we're supposed to be like, 'He messed up. He made a mistake.' — Adrienne Bailon

And then there was an explosion. — Adrienne Kress

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

We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core. Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of truth. — Adrienne Rich

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

I guess, that's why I'm so greedy with you," Ellis said. "You've given me a slice of life. Now I want the whole damn cake. — Adrienne Wilder

You would be forgiven for thinking Alex Morningside was a boy. In fact, she would be the first to laugh at this, because, for one thing, she wasn't, and for another, she had an Excellent Sense of Humour. It wasn't that she wanted to be a boy or anything, it was simply that she didn't see much difference in being treated as a girl or boy. Because, after all, everyone is just people.
One of the reasons people thought she was a boy was her haircut. Her haircut looked like someone had put a bowl on her head and cut around it. Which is exactly what her uncle had done. Also, they thought she was a boy because her name was Alex. Of course, Alex was short for Alexandra, but neither Alex nor her uncle liked that very much, so they shortened the name. They could have shortened it the other was I suppose - Andra - but she and her uncle preferred Alex. — Adrienne Kress

But the night doesn't swallow her up.
Everywhere she goes she is still there;
the silence is as big as herself. — Adrienne Su

Our horizon is the creation of a noble society to which, like the medieval builder of those glorious cathedrals, you will have added your conception, your artful piece of stone. — Adrienne Clarkson

Autism doesn't have to define a person. Artists with autism are like anyone else: They define themselves through hard work and individuality. — Adrienne Bailon

And, my friend, above all things, you most definitely, definitely, do not get away with stepping over the red rope. — Adrienne Kress

There are certain bits of stories that, because of their nature, are rather dull. This is because very little happens in them. And for some reason, they also always happen to take place over a rather tediously long period of time. So, yes, I could tell you of the five-hour trek Timothy and Alex took to reach the hidden bay. I could tell you that when they reached the fort, the view was rather impressive. I could also mention that Timothy lost his footing at one point as they made their way through the thick forest on the other side and, had Alex not grabbed the back of his jacket, his tale would have ended there rather abruptly.
But honestly ...
Let's just get to the pirate stuff already. — Adrienne Kress

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

The belief that established science and scholarship
which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making
are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture! — Adrienne Rich

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

Strangers are an endangered species ... — Adrienne Rich

Weather abroad
and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction. — Adrienne Rich

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

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

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

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs ... — Adrienne Rich

Always remember that somebody is praying for the opportunity that you have. — Adrienne Bailon

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision", i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. has a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it," There's less there than meets the eye". Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyses reality by changing it. — Joanna Russ

Understand that life is journey. I haven't achieved the success I wanted to achieve yet, but that's OK - it's coming. — Adrienne Bailon

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama. — Adrienne Rich

I think that the actors that I work with feel safer with me. Because they know I understand what they go through and I don't see them as chess pieces. — Adrienne Shelly

I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes ... are maps ... I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail — Adrienne Rich

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment. — Adrienne Rich

Britney Spears can't hold a conversation. (mind controlled) The ultimate meltdown was Britney Spears. But she (Spears) can't hold a conversation. No. They have someone who feeds her what she is supposed to say. Like she can't hold a conversation. — Adrienne Bailon

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being. — Adrienne Rich

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness. — Adrienne Rich

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture. — Adrienne Monnier

When I find a fashion formula I love, I tend to stick to it. There's nothing wrong with wearing a look over and over again, if it suits you and makes you feel great. — Adrienne Maloof

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence — Adrienne Rich

But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival. — Adrienne Rich

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

Even before I wholly knew I was a lesbian, it was the lesbian in me who pursued that elusive configuration. And I believe it is the lesbian in every woman who is compelled by female energy, who gravitates toward strong women, who seeks literature that will express that energy and strength. It is the lesbian in us who drives us to feel imaginatively, render in language, grasp, the full connection between woman and woman. — Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich was one of the most widely-read and influential poets of her time, a leading feminist, known especially for her politically-engaged verse. Her best-known volume, "Diving into the Wreck," won the National Book Award in 1973. — Earl Scruggs

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

They want to talk to you tomorrow."
"Tomo ... " Chase choked on the word. "As in the day after today?"
"Is there any other kind? — Adrienne Wilder

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 moment of change is the only poem. — Adrienne Rich

Sleep comes hard. I'd rather lie awake and read. — Adrienne Rich

We write from the marrow of our bones. — Adrienne Rich

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

in a curious and unanticipated way, we really do welcome the birth of our child. There — Adrienne Rich

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

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

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat. — 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

In all the horror films that I have done, all of those women were strong women. I don't feel I ever played the victim, although I was always in jeopardy. — Adrienne Barbeau

It wasn't the first time I played on death's porch, but it didn't mean that I was used to it either. It was weird how in the movies your whole life okays out in slow motion. It was nothing like that. It was horrible. — Adrienne Woods

What the fuck?" That was me. Pete's not an f-word kinda guy. Me? My current record is eighty-two F-bombs in under a minute. — Adrienne Wilder

Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth
and surprising reality
of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past and as far afield as the Great Wall of China. With the restless curiosity and meticulous scholarship that have become her hallmark, the author once again has found a gap in my bookshelf and filled it, admirably. — Steven Saylor

There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides. — Adrienne Rich

Why?" His question was almost buried by my heavy breathing.
I think I understood the question now. I could only hope I had the right answer. If there was one.
"Because I want to trust, be trusted. I want someone I can count on, someone who can count on me. I want somewhere safe. I want a home. But that can only happen if I'm with you."
"I'm never going to be like other men, Grant."
I wasn't sure what he meant until I turned enough to see his expression. The knowledge in his eyes spoke of those places he looked into. The windows or portals he disappeared into when he followed the light.
"I can give you what I have, but I can never give you everything." It wasn't Morgan didn't want to, he couldn't. I could see that too. He could never give me all of himself because he didn't control everything he had.
Could I live with that? — Adrienne Wilder

[The maid] went on and on about how you and three casks of wine and three women spent the week before our wedding trying to...you know"--Adrienne muttered an unintelligible word--"your brains out."
"To what my brains out?"
"You know." Adrienne rolled her eyes.
"I'm afraid I don't. What was that word again?"
"Adrienne looked at him sharply. Was he teasing her? Were his eyes alight with mischief? That half-smile curving his beautiful mouth could absolutely melt the sheet she was clutching, not to mention her will. "Apparently one of them succeeded, because if you had any brains left you'd get out of my sight now," she snapped.
"It wasn't three." Hawk swallowed a laugh.
"No?"
"It was five."
"Adrienne's jaw clenched. She held her fingers up again. "Fourth--this will be a marriage in name only. Period."
"Casks of wine, I meant."
"You are not funny. — Karen Marie Moning

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way, become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far: the rune; the chant; the incantation; the spell; the kenning; sacred words; forbidden words; the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted on vellum, or traced in sand. — Adrienne Rich

The thing I came for:
[ ... ]
the thing itself and not the myth — Adrienne Rich

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

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain? — Adrienne Rich

I had the best image of several dragons sitting on a couch crying into a microphone ... — Adrienne Kress

In her dreams the Hawk would be waiting for her by the sea's edge; her kilt-clad, magnificent Scottish laird. He would smile and his eyes would crinkle, then turn dark with
smoldering passion.
She would take his hand and lay it gently on her swelling abdomen, and his face would blaze with happiness and
pride. Then he would take her gently, there on the cliff's edge, in tempo with the pounding of the ocean. He would
make fierce and possessive love to her and she would hold on to him as tightly as she could. But before dawn, he would melt right through her fingers. And she would wake up, her cheeks wet with tears and her hands clutching nothing but a bit of quilt or pillow. — Karen Marie Moning

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

I suddenly see the world
as no longer viable:
you are out there burning the crops
with some new sublimate
This morning you left the bed
we still share
and went out to spread impotence
upon the world

I hate you.
I hate the mask you wear, your eyes
assuming a depth
they do not possess, drawing me
into the grotto of your skull
the landscape of bone
I hate your words
they make you think of fake
revolutionary bills
crisp imitation parchment
they sell at battlefields.

Last night, in this room, weeping
I asked you: what are you feeling?
do you feel anything?
Now in the torsion of your body
as you defoliate the fields we lived from
I have your answer. — Adrienne Rich

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

A dream of tenderness
wrestles with all I know of history — Adrienne Rich

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful. — Adrienne Rich

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us. — Adrienne Rich

I have an odd fetish with nails. I was always doing beauty blogs about nails, and it would be on Fridays called 'Friday's Fingertip Fetish.' It became so popular that a nail polish company approached me, and Fingertip Fetish was born. — Adrienne Bailon

what makes you a leader is the will to lead, not the knowledge how to do it best. You just have to be bright enough to listen to those who do know, and make the decisions that they don't want to be responsible for. That's how a team works. — Adrienne Lecter

Jesus, Martin, what the hell do I pay you for?"
"My good looks, the occasional blow job, and my constant supply of Jim Beam."
"You've never given me a blow job."
"True, but you've fantasized about it. — Adrienne Wilder

While he wished for a different life, the concept terrified him. There was one thing that he wasn't afraid of. The one thing he hungered for every day. Someone to hold him when the frustration crushed the tears from his eyes, someone he could tell his fears, and someone who would listen to his dreams. An end to this loneliness. — Adrienne Wilder

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

So whatever you think of me, don't pity me. I had a beautiful life. I was loved, admired, feted, copied, mocked, treasured, and feared. I am one hundred years old and I am no longer afraid of anything. — Adrienne Sharp

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,
and somehow, each of us will help the other live,
and somewhere, each of us must help the other die. — 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

You're going to give yourself to me, Morgan. You're going to trust me because you told me you did. And do you know why?"
Morgan shook his head.
"Because you're perfect and for some reason you find me worthy of your perfection. Because you're a gift and I will not let you forget that." I brushed my lips against his. His dark eyes searched mine. "And do you know the most important reason?"
"No."
"Because I love you. — Adrienne Wilder

When you falter, all eludes.
This is a seasick way,
this almost/never touching, this
drawing-off, this to-and-fro.
Subtlety stalks in your eyes,
your tongue knows what it knows.
I want your secrets - Iwillhave them out.
Seasick, I drop into the sea. — Adrienne Rich

Being Latina to me is living your life like it's a big old fiesta! — Adrienne Bailon

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

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

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance. — Adrienne Rich

War with poison and chemicals was not so rare in the ancient world ... An astounding panoply of toxic substances, venomous creatures, poison plants, animals and insects, deleterious environments, virulent pathogens, infectious agents, noxious gases, and combustible chemicals were marshalled to defeat foes - and panoply is an apt term here, because it is the ancient Greek word for 'all weapons. — Adrienne Mayor

I don't think I'd volunteer to have a dick that big. How the hell did he get it to fit in his pants?
[ ... ]
Yeah, and here I thought he was figuratively a horse's ass. Who would have ever thought he actually had anatomical similarities? — Adrienne Wilder

Wait," I cleared my throat. "He eats the cows?"
"What else would he do with them?" Morgan put his empty brownie plate with the rest of the trash.
"I thought he had the cows because of his wife."
"He does."
"Then how can he eat them?"
"What do you think they were going to do with the first cow?"
"I don't know, I just thought, well ... I don't know what I thought, but it sure wasn't grinding them up and making burgers. That just seems wrong."
"Why?"
"They remind him of his wife."
"And she ran a restaurant. C'mon, Grant, this is real life, not a Hallmark movie. Man's gotta eat. — Adrienne Wilder

There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence. — Cheryl Strayed