Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
ADRIENNE RICHThe [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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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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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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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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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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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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
ADRIENNE RICH