Quote

The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Adrienne Rich

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Artist
Temporary
Art
Local
Become
Difficulty
Clogged
Merely
Misdirected
Concern
Disturbances
Higher
Disturbance
Struggle
Channel
Song
Locals

More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Image
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
Adrienne Rich
Image
...you look at me like an emergency
Adrienne Rich
Image
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
Adrienne Rich
Image
TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
Adrienne Rich
Image
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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
Image
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
Adrienne Rich
Image
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.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
Adrienne Rich
Image
Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
Adrienne Rich
Image
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
Adrienne Rich
Image
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
Adrienne Rich
Image
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
Adrienne Rich
Image
In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
Adrienne Rich
Image
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
Adrienne Rich
Image
In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
Adrienne Rich