Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
ADRIENNE RICHPride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
ADRIENNE RICHPoetry 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 RICHWhen someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
ADRIENNE RICHThe most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
ADRIENNE RICHI am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
ADRIENNE RICHSome turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
ADRIENNE RICHHeterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
ADRIENNE RICHThere being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence
ADRIENNE RICHThe mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICHLife on the planet is born of woman.
ADRIENNE RICHhe ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
ADRIENNE RICHOur thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
ADRIENNE RICHWe may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
ADRIENNE RICHThe 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.
ADRIENNE RICHWhen my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
ADRIENNE RICHThe words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
ADRIENNE RICH