It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.
ADRIENNE RICHIt’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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 -
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICH -
An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 RICH -
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 -
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
ADRIENNE RICH -
If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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