What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
ADRIENNE RICHPoetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.
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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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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
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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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the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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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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If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
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Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
ADRIENNE RICH