To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
ADRIENNE RICHThere must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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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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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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There 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
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
ADRIENNE RICH






