Adrienne Rich: Woman

Adrienne Rich was American poet, essayist and feminist. Explore interesting quotes on woman.

Adrienne Rich: 102 quotes9 likes

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

“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”

Source: The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984

“A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), no. 3
Variant: A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
that beak which grips her, she becomes.

“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.”

Source: Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

“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.”

As quoted in Ms. magazine (September 1979), p. 44

“No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”

Blood, Bread and Poetry (1986), ch. 1