It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
ADRIENNE RICHThe moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A language is a map of our failures.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
ADRIENNE RICH -
The moment of change is the only poem.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
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.
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Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
ADRIENNE RICH -
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
ADRIENNE RICH -
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
ADRIENNE RICH -
Show 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.
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Only where there is language is there world.
ADRIENNE RICH