• Categories
  • Adrienne Rich Quotes   253
  • I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes
  • ... 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Growing Up Quotes , Real Quotes
  • You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Writing Quotes
  • Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Girl Quotes , Men Quotes
  • Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap, the coffee, the rice, to iron the pants, to braid the hair, to pull the day's water up from the well, to boil water for tea, to wash the children for school, to pull the vegetables and start the walk to market, to run to catch the bus for the work that is paid. I don't know when most women sleep.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Running Quotes , Children Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Work Quotes
  • 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
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Sleep Quotes , Dark Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Hate Quotes , Passion Quotes
  • [The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Risk Quotes , Survival Quotes
  • Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative - that we're just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different - that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Destiny Quotes , Ideas Quotes