Adrienne Rich Quotes, Writing Quotes

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Writing Quotes

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Vision Quotes , Goes On Quotes

I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Gay Quotes , Talking Quotes

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Change Quotes , Light Quotes

... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Freedom Quotes , War Quotes

To do something very common, in my own way.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Way Quotes , Common Quotes

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Silence Quotes , World Quotes

When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Mirrors Quotes

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Warrior Quotes

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Motherhood Quotes , Assumption Quotes

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Desire Quotes , Might Quotes

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Mean Quotes

I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Creativity Quotes , Darkness Quotes

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Pride Quotes

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Reading Quotes , Mean Quotes

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Heart Quotes , Age Quotes

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Real Quotes , Nuclear Quotes

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Art Quotes , Work Quotes

The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Adrienne Rich Quotes , Artist Quotes , Self Quotes