I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
ADRIENNE RICHIt will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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 -
What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
ADRIENNE RICH -
Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.
ADRIENNE RICH -
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
ADRIENNE RICH -
the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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 -
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH