Adrienne Rich Quotes

Adrienne Rich (29)

Birth:	16th May, 1929
Death:	27th March, 2012
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Essayist, Poet

About

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Today's Anniversary - 26th May

Births

• 1822 - Edmond de Goncourt
• 1895 - Dorothea Lange
• 1928 - Jack Kevorkian
• 1947 - Glenn Turner
• 1962 - Genie Francis

Deaths

• 1648 - Vincent Voiture
• 1976 - Martin Heidegger
• 1853 - James Chalmers
• 1974 - Stewart Alsop
• 1967 - Alexander Wiley

• I choose to love this time for once
  with all my intelligence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Poetry

• Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Poetry

• Lying is done with words and also with silence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Silence, Lying, Communication

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

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in History, Truth

  Tags in News

• Life on the planet is born of woman.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Women, Beginning

• The moment of change is the only poem.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change/Growth, Poetry

• When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Truth

  Tags in Interdependence, Women
• 

  Lying is done with words and also with silence.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Lying, Words

• Certainly the mother serves the interests of patriarchy: she exemplifies in one person religion, social conscience, and nationalism. Institutional motherhood revives and renews all other institutions.

  Adrienne Rich

  Topics in Mother

• We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be “revolutionary” but not transformative.

  Adrienne Rich

• They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?

  Adrienne Rich

• The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.

  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

• 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

• The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

  Adrienne Rich

• The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

  Adrienne Rich

• Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

  Adrienne Rich

• Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

  Adrienne Rich

• Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

  Adrienne Rich