Quotes of Adrienne Rich - somelinesforyou

“ Lying is done with words and also with silence. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message: You are there!. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ 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. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutionspredigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. ”

- 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

“ Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends in large part on their understanding of honor. Much of what is narrowly termed "politics" seems to rest on a longing for certainty even at the cost of honesty, for an analysis which, once given, need not be reexamined…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. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ 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. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ [Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ 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

“ ...you look at me like an emergency ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence from "Splittings ”

- 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

“ It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealmentthat explodes in poetry. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ but from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ 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. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ the phantom of the manwhowouldunderstand, the lost brother, the twin for him did we leave our mothers, deny our sisters, over and over? did we invent him, conjure him over the charring log, nights, late, in the snowbound cabin did we dream or scry his face in the liquid embers, the manwhowoulddaretoknowus? It was never the rapist: it was the brother, lost, the comrade/twin whose palm would bear a lifeline like our own: decisive, arrowy, forkedlightning of insatiate desire It was never the crude pestle, the blind ramrod we were after: merely a fellowcreature with natural resources equal to our own. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ For now, poetry has the capacity in its own ways and by its own means to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. ”

- 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

“ To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ The wave changed instantly by rock; the rock changed by the wave returning over and over. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ The Soviet Union was a bad application and destructive and mistaken reading of Karl Marx. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons. ”

- 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 patriarchical i. ”

- 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

“ A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. ”

- Adrienne Rich

“ A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. ”

- Adrienne Rich
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