It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
ADRIENNE RICHAs her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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 -
Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
ADRIENNE RICH -
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself.
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 -
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICH -
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
ADRIENNE RICH