Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
Adrienne Rich
152 quotes
“Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1951 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" in A Change of World (1951)
“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1963 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), no. 3
“I have to say that what I know I know through making poems.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poetry and Experience" (1964)
“instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poetry and Experience" (1964)
“The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1972 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: fragment from "Diving into the Wreck" (1972)
“To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Ms. magazine (September 1979), p. 44
“False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day... The lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Turning the Wheel (1981), section 2
“What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.-- what would it feel like to know your country was changing?-- You yourself must change it.-- Though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair?”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1983 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: fragment from "Dreams Before Waking" (1983)
“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 of kinship where all is represented as separation.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Defy the Space That Separates," The Nation, October 7, 1996
“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. (p55, "The 'Sacred Calling'")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture. (p249, "Motherhood and Daughterhood")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and plainful. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him. ("Husband-Right and Father-Right" 1977)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think that passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. (from "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman" 1977)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power. (from "Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap" 1978)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival. ("Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap" 1978)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had been looking for the Women's Liberation movement since the 1950s. I came into it in 1970 (Forward)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing... ("Toward a More Feminist Criticism")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. And to make yourself visible, to claim that your experience is just as real and normative as any other... ("Invisibility in Academe")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Patriarchy is no more an abstraction than imperialism is, once you have tasted it in your mouth, felt it across your flesh. ("North American Tunnel Vision" 1983)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a feminist in the United States it seemed necessary to examine how we participate in mainstream North American cultural chauvinism, the sometimes unconscious belief that white North Americans possess a superior right to judge, select, and ransack other cultures, that we are more "advanced" than other peoples of this hemisphere. ("North American Tunnel Vision" 1983)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminism has always been shaped and fired by the question How can things be other than they are? What if...? (p190 "The Soul of a Woman's College")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this decade now ending, as more women are entering the professions (though still suffering sexual harassment in the workplace, though still, if they have children, carrying two full-time jobs, though still vastly outnumbered by men in upper-level and decision-making jobs), we need most profoundly to remember that early insight of the feminist movement as it evolved in the late sixties: that no woman is liberated until w all are liberated.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An early objection to feminism-in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-was that it would make women behave like men-ruthlessly, exploitatively, oppressively. In fact, radical feminism looks to a transformation of human relationships and structures in which power, instead of a thing to be hoarded by a few, would be released to and from within the many, shared in the form of knowledge, expertise, decision making, access to tools, as well as in the basic forms of food and shelter and health care and literacy.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The belief that established science and scholarship-which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making-are "objective" and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was only in college, when I read a poem by Karl Shapiro beginning "To hate the Negro and avoid the Jew/ is the curriculum," that it flashed on me that there was an untold side to my father's story of his student years.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“According to Nazi logic, my two Jewish grandparents would have made me a Mischling, first-degree-nonexempt from the Final Solution.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At different times in my life I have wanted to push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman; I am a lesbian. If I call myself a Jewish lesbian, do I thereby try to shed some of my southern gentile white woman's culpability? If I call myself only through my mother, is it because I pass more easily through a world where being a lesbian often seems like outsiderhood enough?”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“These were the 1940s, and we were told a great deal about the Battle of Britain, the noble French Resistance fighters, the brave, starving Dutch-but I did not learn of the resistance of the Warsaw ghetto until I left home.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anti-Semitism was so intrinsic as not to have a name.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“it came to me that every one of those piles of corpses, mountains of shoes and clothing had contained, simply, individuals, who had believed, as I now believed of myself, that they were intended to live out a life of some kind of meaning, that the world possessed some kind of sense and order, yet this had happened to them.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was admittedly young and trying to educate myself, but I was also doing something that is dangerous: I was flirting with identity.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“what isn't named is often more permeating than what is”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It (1968) was a year of intensifying political awareness for me: the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Columbia strike.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The struggle for Black civil rights had such clarity about it for me: I knew that segregation was wrong, that unequal opportunity was wrong, I knew that segregation in particular was more than a set of social and legal rules-it meant that even "decent" white people lived in a network of lies and arrogance and moral collusion.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I didn't understand then that I was living between two strains of Jewish social identity: the Jew as radical visionary and activist who understands oppression firsthand, and the Jew as part of America's devouring plan in which the persecuted, called to assimilation, learn that the price is to engage in persecution.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reading The Second Sex in the 1950s isolation of an academic housewife had felt less dangerous than reading "The Myth of Vaginal Orgasm" or "Woman-identified Woman" in a world where I was in constant debate and discussion with women over every aspect of our lives that we could as yet name.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root-that I will never bring them whole.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“sometimes I feel inadequate to make any statement as a Jew; I feel the history of denial within me like an injury, a scar. For assimilation has affected my perceptions; those early lapses in meaning, those blanks, are with me still. My ignorance can be dangerous to me and to others. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“White men need a history that does not simply "include" peoples of color and white women, but that shows the process by which the arrogance of hierarchy and the celebration of violence have reached a point of destructiveness almost out of control. In other words, white men need to start questioning the text handed down from father to son, the dominator's version.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminist history charges us, as women committed to the liberation of women, to know the past in order to consider what we want to conserve and what we want not to repeat or continue. To see patterns, connections, which the false assimilation of liberal humanism obscures. To draw strength: Memory is nutriment, and seeds stored for centuries can still germinate.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As feminists, we need to be looking above all for the greatness and sanity of ordinary women, and how these women have collectively waged resistance. In searching that territory we find something better than individual heroines: the astonishing continuity of women's imagination of survival, persisting through the great and little deaths of daily life.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If it is the present that calls us to activism, it is history that must nourish our choices and commitment.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we need to know where we have been: we need our history.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source