The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICHWhen 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
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 -
I came to explore the wreck.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
ADRIENNE RICH -
That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
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 -
Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICH






