A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
ADRIENNE RICHIf you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
ADRIENNE RICH -
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
ADRIENNE RICH -
An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- 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 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 -
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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 -
The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
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 -
What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICH -
If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
ADRIENNE RICH -
That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
ADRIENNE RICH