Meaning of the quote

All life on Earth comes from women. Women have the power to create new life, a remarkable ability that is at the very core of our existence as a species.

About Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich was an acclaimed American poet and feminist who brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse. She was known for her influential work and her refusal to accept the National Medal of Arts in protest against funding cuts for the arts.

More about the author

More quotes from Adrienne Rich

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

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

The moment of change is the only poem.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

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

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

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

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

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

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

Life on the planet is born of woman.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

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

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)

It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

Adrienne Rich

American poet, essayist and feminist (1929-2012)