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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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
Hear
Complacency
Break
Selves
Help
Encounter
Society
Encounters
Helping
Extent
Matter
Longing
Disregarded
Self
Despair
Erased
Writers
Numbness
More quotes by Adrienne Rich
I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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
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
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.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
Adrienne Rich
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
Adrienne Rich
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
Adrienne Rich
Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
Adrienne Rich
It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
Adrienne Rich
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.
Adrienne Rich
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
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Adrienne Rich
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
Adrienne Rich
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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
[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
Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
Adrienne Rich
Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
Adrienne Rich
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
