The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICHThe mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICHWe need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICHThe dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
ADRIENNE RICHNot biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
ADRIENNE RICHA patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
ADRIENNE RICHSexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
ADRIENNE RICHEven where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
ADRIENNE RICHTo do something very common, in my own way.
ADRIENNE RICHYour mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
ADRIENNE RICHSometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
ADRIENNE RICHMy children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICHWhat I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
ADRIENNE RICHNothing 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 RICHFor now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
ADRIENNE RICHEvery poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
ADRIENNE RICHStrangers are an endangered species.
ADRIENNE RICH