The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
ADRIENNE RICHIf you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
ADRIENNE RICH -
“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
ADRIENNE RICH -
To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Experience is always larger than language.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 RICH -
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
ADRIENNE RICH -
If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
ADRIENNE RICH