Adrienne Rich Quotes

EACH DAY OF HUMAN life contains joy and anger, pain and pleasure, darkness and light, growth and decay. Each moment is etched with nature’s grand design-do not try to deny or oppose the cosmic order of things.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

The body is the substance of the stone.

What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything. What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. . . . . All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection.

We live equally out of our bodies and out of our minds.

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish.

The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature.

The elemental world we all live in is the darkness of the body.

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.

Everything is reduced to what's physical in the end, because it's the filth inside people's minds that creates all the evil. What is a body, anyway? I suppose you've got to abuse your body to understand it. If you're not prepared to humiliate yourself in order to give somebody else a moment's pleasure, I don't believe that you've actually lived.

Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body.

Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

Nature loves simplicity and unity.

Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.

Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain Here earth and water seem to strive again, Not chaos-like together crushed and bruised, But, as the world, harmoniously confused: Where order in variety we see, And where, though all things differ, all agree.

We think that because we dwell inside our bodies that we are separate from other people who dwell inside theirs.

Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.

You must maintain strength of body in order to preserve strength of mind.

Touch me, touch the palm of your hand to my body as I pass, Be not afraid of my body.

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

Nature is constrained by the cause of her laws which dwell inborn in her. Variant: Nature is constrained by the order of her own law which lives and works within her.