I feel more helpless with you than without you.
ADRIENNE RICHThe necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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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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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
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Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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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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You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
ADRIENNE RICH






