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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
Adrienne Rich
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Adrienne Rich
Age: 82 †
Born: 1929
Born: May 16
Died: 2012
Died: March 27
Essayist
Feminist
Peace Activist
Poet
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Adrienne Cecile Rich
Adrienne Cécile Rich
Adrienne Riche
Tenderness
Nerves
Alternation
Bitter
Edged
Suffering
Murderous
Ambivalence
Blissful
Gratification
Resentment
More quotes by Adrienne Rich
Since 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.
Adrienne Rich
To write as if your life depended on it to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
Adrienne Rich
A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
Adrienne Rich
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
Adrienne Rich
The moment of change is the only poem.
Adrienne Rich
You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
Adrienne Rich
Strangers are an endangered species.
Adrienne Rich
... 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?
Adrienne Rich
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
Adrienne Rich
Life on the planet is born of woman.
Adrienne Rich
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
Adrienne Rich
motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
Adrienne Rich
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
Adrienne Rich
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
We have lived with violence far too long.
Adrienne Rich
Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
Adrienne Rich
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
Adrienne Rich
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
Adrienne Rich
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
Adrienne Rich