False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
ADRIENNE RICHOur personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
ADRIENNE RICH -
Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
ADRIENNE RICH