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What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?--
You yourself must change it.--
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?--
You yourself must change it.--
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?

— Adrienne Rich

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More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.

Experience is always larger than language.

Interview (1991)

I have to say that what I know I know through making poems.

Poetry and Experience (1964)

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness.

I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.

Arts of the Possible (2000)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Adrienne Rich (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.