Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
ADRIENNE RICHThe longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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
ADRIENNE RICH -
Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Life on the planet is born of woman.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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 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 RICH -
TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 RICH -
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
ADRIENNE RICH






