Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose Quotes

“The enemy is always outside the self, the struggle somewhere else.”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism

“Perhaps many white North Americans fear an overtly political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are “rationally” against; it might get us on a level we have lost touch with; undermine the safety we have built for oneselves, remind us of what is better left forgotten.”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism

“There is nothing North Americans seem to fear so much as manipulation, probably because at some level we know that we belong to a deeply manipulative system.”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism

“When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we seek their residues wherever we can trace them”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism

“The wave changed instantly by rock; the rock changed by the wave returning over and over.”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism

“Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused be gallantry we hear
our mediocrities over-prized,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.”
― Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems Prose Reviews and Criticism