Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Richwas an American poet, essayist and radical 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."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 May 1929
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
Adrienne Rich quotes about
children motherhood identity
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
optimism long important
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ...
hate passion race
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.
running children past
Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
winning men self
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 mansince men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
art feminist culture
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!
giving world rooms
... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
home suffering scenery
To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery ...
dream escaping political
When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
change light people
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
freedom war writing
... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
art wall years
One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
heart weather predictions
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
hope mean cities
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.