If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
ADRIENNE RICHSince we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child
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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.
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Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
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I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
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Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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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.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
ADRIENNE RICH