The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
ADRIENNE RICHThe password is a flicker of an eyelash.
ADRIENNE RICHYoung people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
ADRIENNE RICHThey can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
ADRIENNE RICHThe vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
ADRIENNE RICHWe are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
ADRIENNE RICHWhat it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICHIn the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
ADRIENNE RICHMy children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICHA thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
ADRIENNE RICHIn the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
ADRIENNE RICHOne line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
ADRIENNE RICHAcross the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
ADRIENNE RICHIf you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
ADRIENNE RICHI 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.
ADRIENNE RICHEvery journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
ADRIENNE RICH