What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
ADRIENNE RICHWhat I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICHThe password is a flicker of an eyelash.
ADRIENNE RICHMuch male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
ADRIENNE RICHThese scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
ADRIENNE RICHWe see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
ADRIENNE RICHThe suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
ADRIENNE RICHThe will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
ADRIENNE RICHLesbian 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.
ADRIENNE RICHEven the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
ADRIENNE RICHThe ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
ADRIENNE RICHGrief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
ADRIENNE RICHTo write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
ADRIENNE RICHThat primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
ADRIENNE RICHMy heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
ADRIENNE RICHAn honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
ADRIENNE RICH