When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
ADRIENNE RICHI touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
ADRIENNE RICH -
And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
ADRIENNE RICH -
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
ADRIENNE RICH