Quotessence
Home / Authors / Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich Quotes

Poet

Filter quotes by topic

AllPoetryFeminismPoemIfsThinkingLanguageArtHumansWorldBodyKnowsPeopleChildrenMotherhoodWayMeanPoetWritingCultureMother

Famous Adrienne Rich Quotes

“In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.”

WellsChildrenStillsSelfStatesBodyRealityPoliticalChoicesChurchUnitedClassUnited StatesMiddleIgnoranceDeterminationCatholicMalesIncludingProfessionMedicalLifestyleAlternativesAbortionDependentMiddle ClassSelf DeterminationDisguiseCatholic ChurchLegislatorsPhysicalityPharmaceuticalVeneerJurists
Author:Adrienne Rich
Create image

“Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.”

TwoBodyMotherMonthsSurvivalDaughterFemaleNineSubversiveMother And DaughterNine MonthsSubliminal
Book:Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution
Create image

“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.”

Has BeensBookBodyHandsPoetryTurnsFallLanguageMemoriesPrayerBuildingPoetDisasterBlockDustLandscapeGravityCollapseCould Have BeenColumnsNotebookJerkBarrelsDebrisBucklesCenter Of Gravity
Book:What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)
Create image

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.”

MindHas BeensBodyRealityCultureCenturyMadInstinctMalesSakeDrivenObligationPrimariesExpediencyRefutation
Author:Adrienne Rich
Create image

“We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe. Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.”

IfsThinkingWorldNeedsHumansChildrenBodyUniverseCommunityExistenceVisionImagineGeniusBalanceIndependenceSexualityMotherhoodIntimacyTransformedNew LifeHuman ExistenceConsoleOnly ChildIfs AndNew Relationship
Book:Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution
Create image