Adrienne Rich Quotes about Life

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A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.

Adrienne Rich

Life, Tools

Adrienne Cecile Rich (1951). “Selected poems, 1950-1995”, Salmon Publishing

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, 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; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

Adrienne Rich

Life, Respect, Believe

Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?

Adrienne Rich

Life, Poetry, Taught

Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.50, W. W. Norton & Company

We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.

Adrienne Rich

Life, Memories, Way

Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company