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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Adrienne Rich

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cutting Enough Flesh Open Ripped Scar
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
ADRIENNE RICH

Afford Artist Deceiving Self Sentimental Serious
if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bias Drifting History Male Myth Response Similarly Unanchored Unaware Veering Women
It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
ADRIENNE RICH

Changeable Daily Earth Eternal Indestructible Life Live Spawn Swallow Threating Unstable
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
ADRIENNE RICH

Aspiration Easy Fall Mean Refuse Responsibility Sell Shallow Solution Talent Yourself
When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Looking Mirror Nothing Someone Speak Teacher World
I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
ADRIENNE RICH

Gay Lesbian Men People Possibilities Solidarity Suffer Thinking
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Enter Freedom Man Mother Room Think Travel Wife Work
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
ADRIENNE RICH

False Glamour Longer Mistrust Performance Poverty Theatricality Transcendental
It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beyond Existence Own Poet Risk Some Survival
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.
ADRIENNE RICH

Belief Depended Dreamlife Intelligent Mean Multiple Choice Physical Reading Sensation Swirl
The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
ADRIENNE RICH

Correspond Men's Monsters Moon Ocean Pull Respond Women
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
ADRIENNE RICH

Amazement Both Complexity Confusion Daughter Mother
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
ADRIENNE RICH

Counted Down Inspirational Sit Warrior Weep
What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Government Represent Same Thing
Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
ADRIENNE RICH

Abusive Begin Heal Individual Psychic Society Stories Want

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

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Popular Authors

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Adrienne Rich Quotes