Adrienne Rich Quotes

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

Marvin Bell always looked very closely at how lines could break, how you could put over one line into the second line. How you could stop the line two or three times within the line: You could make it stop.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Silence does for thinking what a suspension bridge does for space -- it makes connections.

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

Poetry, I thought then, and still do, is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing.

When I am doing things around the house - when I'm decorating, setting up furniture, putting out a vase of flowers, lighting my candles, my mind is always thinking, "What do I need to do to make this space peaceful and restful and comfortable so that when people walk into it, aesthetically they're heightened and enlightened?"

When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.

We think that's necessary just as a foundation for economic growth. It's not the jobs in and of themselves, which you do make by building bridges and things like this, but it's the economic growth that comes from having a modern infrastructure that is in dire need of repair.

To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.

What really intrigues me is that the totality of all possible Nows of any definite kind has a very special structure. You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in the country is a Now.

Glenn must think he's still in space. He's orbiting the issues faster than he orbited earth.

I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.

I'm hoping that the suspension of the space program is just that, a suspension, and that it's not the final say in the matter, because I think we need it.

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible... Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, what will this do to our community? tends toward the right answer for the world.

There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.

I think also people in states like Pennsylvania know that a lot of money and effort and time needs to be spent on knitting America back together, on the bridges and the roads and the infrastructure and the education.

If some people really see angels where others see only empty space, let them paint the angels: only let not anybody else think they can paint an angel too, on any calculated principles of the angelic.

Well, you know, I think the American people are sacrificing now. I think they're waiting in airport lines longer than they've ever had before.

I think that autistic brains tend to be specialized brains. Autistic people tend to be less social. It takes a ton of processor space in the brain to have all the social circuits. I mean after all, the first stone spear was not designed by the totally social people.

It’s short-sighted to think ads won’t one day end up wherever humans are - even the moon.

Exploration, of course, is going to new places, but I don't think we go to new places just solely to say: "Well, we've been there," and come back, interesting though it may be. To me, each time we go farther into space we should use that to do basic research - basic research that can't be done before you go there.

I pray. I try to find space to process with a walk on the beach, a hike in the hills. Nature is restorative. I also try not to overreact. I grew up in Ireland, and we are big tea drinkers, and I think it's less about the tea itself and more about the ritual and the moment to prepare.

As soon as I start to write I'm very aware, I'm trying to be aware that a reader just might well pick up this poem, a stranger. So when I'm writing - and I think that this is important for all writers - I'm trying to be a writer and a reader back and forth. I write two lines or three lines. I will immediately stop and turn into a reader instead of a writer, and I'll read those lines as if I had never seen them before and as if I had never written them.

I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.