Experience is always larger than language.
ADRIENNE RICHMuch male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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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.
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
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I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH






