You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
ADRIENNE RICHBut nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Only where there is language is there world.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
ADRIENNE RICH -
the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
ADRIENNE RICH






