When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
ADRIENNE RICHIt requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.
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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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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.
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Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
ADRIENNE RICH






