Adrienne Cecile Rich was a vocal feminist, poet and essayist from the United States, who became one of the most well-known poets of the latter part of the 20th century and has also been credited for being one of the most influential voices on feminism during her time. She studied at Radcliffe College and then went to Oxford University on a Guggenheim Fellowship but she did not complete her course. Rich’s first book of poetry collections titled ‘A Change of the World’ received plaudits and she got the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for the book. Some of her noted works include ‘The Dream of a Common Language’, ‘Diving Into the Wreck’, ‘Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law’, ‘A Wild Patience Has Taken Me this Far’ and ‘An Atlas of the Difficult World’, among others. On the other hand, she has also written a bit of non-fiction on issues about which she felt strongly. Some of the important ones are ‘Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose’, ‘Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution’ and 'On Lies, Secrets and Silence’ among others. Rich was one of the most important intellectuals of her time and her books are still read all over the world due to their literary richness. Here are some of the best quotes by Adrienne Rich.
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
Adrienne Rich
Lying is done with words, and also with silence.
Adrienne Rich
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passion rooted in the city.
[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Adrienne Rich
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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.
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.
No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
that beak which grips her, she becomes.
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
If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
And I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us
which will we claim
how will we go on living
how will we touch, what will we know
what will we say to each other.
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
Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives.
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.
Adrienne Rich
We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege
Adrienne Rich
Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.
Adrienne Rich
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
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.
The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.
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
She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.
Adrienne Rich
I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.
Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.
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.
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet.
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
I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope
And yet, protest it if we will,
Some corner of the mind retains
The medieval man, who still
Keeps watch upon those starry skeins
And drives us out of doors at night
To gaze at anagrams of light.
Adrienne Rich
An education is not something that you get, but something that you claim.
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.
, a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons. )
