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 RICHSince we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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 RICH -
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH -
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
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To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
ADRIENNE RICH






