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 RICHThe 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 RICHThe mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICHResponsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
ADRIENNE RICHThe 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.
ADRIENNE RICHThe moment of change is the only poem.
ADRIENNE RICHSexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
ADRIENNE RICHEvery poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
ADRIENNE RICHThe connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICHAs a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
ADRIENNE RICHThe serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
ADRIENNE RICHEvery real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
ADRIENNE RICHWhat would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.
ADRIENNE RICHThere 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
ADRIENNE RICHWhether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
ADRIENNE RICHI think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
ADRIENNE RICHMarriage is lonelier than solitude.
ADRIENNE RICH