No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.
ADRIENNE RICHIt 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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 -
Responsibility 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 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 -
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH -
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
ADRIENNE RICH