quotes from classic

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

more quotes from Ishmael Reed

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.

more quotes from John Reed

Man thrives where angels would die of ecstasy and where pigs would die of disgust.

more quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

I've been around jazz and jazz musicians most of my life.

more quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

more quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.

more quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?

more quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

This isn't the best town for what we're doing. Too many other things to pull the crowds away.

more quotes from Kenneth Rexroth

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

Life on the planet is born of woman.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

more quotes from Adrienne Rich

It is no use to grumble and complain; It's just as cheap and easy to rejoice; When God sorts out the weather and sends rain - Why, rain's my choice.

more quotes from James Whitcomb Riley