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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.

— Adrienne Rich Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)

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Women

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)

All Adrienne Rich quotes →

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The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

There is a Lady sweet and kind,
Was never face so pleased my mind;
I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.

Thomas Ford

To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman.

Mahatma Gandhi

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Attribution

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.