The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICHThe mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICHIt takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
ADRIENNE RICHPoetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
ADRIENNE RICHLying is done with words and also with silence.
ADRIENNE RICHTo allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICHIn order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
ADRIENNE RICHMotherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
ADRIENNE RICHI’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICHI long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICHRe-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.
ADRIENNE RICHThere is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
ADRIENNE RICHAs a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICHWaiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
ADRIENNE RICHI believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICHWar is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH