I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
ADRIENNE RICHNo one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
ADRIENNE RICH -
No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
ADRIENNE RICH -
When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I feel more helpless with you than without you.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The 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 RICH -
TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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Across 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.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH






