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Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

Adrienne Rich

It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beginning End May Moving November Solistice
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
ADRIENNE RICH

Complicated Delusion Fake False Journey Memories Naming Past People Real
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Choice Help Keep Language Life Move Paralysed Respect
Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cycle Feeling Process Revolutionary Running Still Thinking Transformative
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Control Man Nothing Revolutionary Women
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
ADRIENNE RICH

Creativity Daughter Father Hack Lesbian
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
ADRIENNE RICH

General History Male Merely Over Seen Themselves White Writing
I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
ADRIENNE RICH

Call Jewels Love Sex Tale Year
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Consciousness Fathered Insider Institutions Masculine Really Woman
In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bringing Console Create Sustain Vision Woman
That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Failure Feel Good Helping Measure Represented Themselves War
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

Since Time Week Wrap Years Missing Young
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Complexity Desire Dream Fecundity Struggle Struggling Truth Unconcious
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cutting Enough Flesh Open Ripped Scar
Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Poets have Unravelling Violent Wonderful
No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
ADRIENNE RICH

Common Dream Language Room Sleep

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

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Popular Authors

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Adrienne Rich Quotes