The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICHBut before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
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Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
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A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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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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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
ADRIENNE RICH