Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
ADRIENNE RICHSexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
ADRIENNE RICHAll new learning looks at first like chaos.
ADRIENNE RICHThe words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
ADRIENNE RICHif we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
ADRIENNE RICHI am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
ADRIENNE RICHThere must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
ADRIENNE RICHArt means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
ADRIENNE RICHResponsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
ADRIENNE RICHNo 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 RICHWar is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICHThe impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICHThe liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
ADRIENNE RICHThere 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 RICHThe marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
ADRIENNE RICHI am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
ADRIENNE RICHOur thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
ADRIENNE RICH