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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Adrienne Rich

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Day Inspiring Mother Strike Tied Unionize Worker
Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Abortion Deep Desperate First Herself Violence Woman
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Children Genius Imagine Motherhood New Relationship Woman World
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Knew Mother Nothing Prepared Realization State Uncertain
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Breath Continue Debased Disintegrative Imagination Language Manic Matter Music Poetry Public Reintegrates Speech Technologically Time Voice
The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Erected Patriarchy Terrain Woman
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH

Create Fearfully Impulse Real Silence Terribly Tunnel Voice
Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
ADRIENNE RICH

Birth Child Children Grow Up Waiting
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
ADRIENNE RICH

Authorities Authority Certain Face Life Power Prime Rarely Woman
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
ADRIENNE RICH

Living Money No Stories Tell Wit
Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
ADRIENNE RICH

Connectedness Creativity Human Love Sense Sexually
In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
ADRIENNE RICH

Conscious Cutting Interval Light Profane Revelation Self Stopped Time
Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Description Language Old Transform
To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICH

Answer Carnal Charted Impermeable Ordinary Pierce Reading Right Routine Safe
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternative Consciousness Destiny Flow Grain Idea
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
ADRIENNE RICH

Break Human Important Isolation Justice

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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