The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
ADRIENNE RICHThe channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The moment of change is the only poem.
ADRIENNE RICH -
They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
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 -
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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 -
It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICH