Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
ADRIENNE RICHThe so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
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Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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Poetry 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.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
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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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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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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.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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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.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICH