That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
ADRIENNE RICHThe women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
ADRIENNE RICH -
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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 -
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
ADRIENNE RICH -
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH -
An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
ADRIENNE RICH