Any woman’s death diminishes me.
ADRIENNE RICHThis is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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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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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
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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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We have lived with violence far too long.
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.
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We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
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It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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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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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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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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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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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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If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.
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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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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
ADRIENNE RICH