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Adrienne Rich Quotes about Writing

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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Adrienne Rich
Writing, Mean, Reality

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Adrienne Rich
Writing, Ifs
Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

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
Dream, Memories, Writing
Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Adrienne Rich
Writing, Voice, Stones
Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.104, W. W. Norton & Company

I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

Adrienne Rich
Knowledge, Writing, Long
Adrienne Rich (2016). “Collected Poems: 1950-2012”, p.405, W. W. Norton & Company

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

Adrienne Rich
Art, Reading, Writing

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
Book, Writing, Mean
Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

Adrienne Rich
Art, Writing, Needs
Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.

Adrienne Rich
Hate, Writing, Night
Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.

Adrienne Rich
Writing, White, History

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Adrienne Rich
Art, Writing, Mean
Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

Adrienne Rich
Freedom, War, Writing
Adrienne Rich (2013). “The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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