Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
ADRIENNE RICHLanguage is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
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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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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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In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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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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Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.
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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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Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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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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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
ADRIENNE RICH