The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
ADRIENNE RICHThe difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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When 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.
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There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
ADRIENNE RICH -
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
ADRIENNE RICH