446 Quotes by Adrienne Rich


  • Author Adrienne Rich
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    Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field. It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other.

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  • Author Adrienne Rich
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    because in times like theseto have you listen at all, it’s necessaryto talk about trees.

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  • Author Adrienne Rich
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    The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.

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  • Author Adrienne Rich
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    her choice to be, not only a poet but a woman who explored her own mind, without any of the guidelines of orthodoxy. To say "yes" to her powers was not simply a major act of nonconformity in the nineteenth century; even in our own time it has been assumed that Emily Dickinson, not patriarchal society, was "the problem." The ore we come to recognise the unwritten and written laws and taboos underpining patriarchy, the less problematical, surely, will seem the methods she chose.

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  • Author Adrienne Rich
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    Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

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  • Author Adrienne Rich
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    As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning its government or by saying three times "As a woman my country is the whole world." -Notes Towards a Politics of Location.

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