It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
ADRIENNE RICHI believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
ADRIENNE RICH -
Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
What we see, we see and seeing is changing
ADRIENNE RICH