War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICHShow us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Experience is always larger than language.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When 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 RICH -
The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
ADRIENNE RICH -
A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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