The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
ADRIENNE RICH“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
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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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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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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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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
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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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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of “sexual preference” and the issue of civil rights.
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It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH