It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICHNo woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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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.
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Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
ADRIENNE RICH






