Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
ADRIENNE RICHWriters matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
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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.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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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.
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Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
ADRIENNE RICH






