A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'” Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown. Adrienne Rich mothers-day inspiring children Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth. Adrienne Rich honesty cheating art The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? Adrienne Rich voice tunnels real ... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars Adrienne Rich freedom writing war Only where there is language is there world. Adrienne Rich language world ...you look at me like an emergency Adrienne Rich look-at-me emergencies looks In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. Adrienne Rich united-states danger america I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see. Adrienne Rich prime authority faces Marriage is lonelier than solitude. Adrienne Rich solitude ... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen. Adrienne Rich growing-up flames real I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them. Adrienne Rich dont-trust use But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival. Adrienne Rich survival imagination struggle I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch Adrienne Rich different skins together Reality, the oppressor's tongue. Adrienne Rich poetry literature reality In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence. Adrienne Rich unity body order The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief. Adrienne Rich wall grief war Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be. Adrienne Rich ought liars lying 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. Adrienne Rich creative work art White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic. Adrienne Rich passion hate white 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 political men lying
