I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
ADRIENNE RICHTo “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
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It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
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We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
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Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
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[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
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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.
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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.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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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.
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To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
ADRIENNE RICH