Adrienne Rich

Poet

United States

1929 - 2012

21 quotes

Showing 10 of 21 quotes

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
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
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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 connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
Adrienne Rich
The moment of change is the only poem.
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
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
Adrienne Rich
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.
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