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.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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The 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.
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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.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
ADRIENNE RICH






