It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
ADRIENNE RICHI guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH