It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
ADRIENNE RICHYou must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
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I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
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Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.
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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
ADRIENNE RICH






