It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
ADRIENNE RICHArt and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
ADRIENNE RICH -
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
ADRIENNE RICH -
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
ADRIENNE RICH -
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
ADRIENNE RICH -
“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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 -
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
ADRIENNE RICH