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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.

Adrienne Rich

We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Children Genius Imagine Motherhood New Relationship Woman World
And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
ADRIENNE RICH

Change History Make Perhaps Suffering
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
ADRIENNE RICH

Authority Describe Disequilibrium Individual Strength Mirror Physic Teacher World
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
ADRIENNE RICH

Adolescence Carrying Lesbian Limb Sexuality Stretch
Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
ADRIENNE RICH

Abusive Begin Heal Individual Psychic Society Stories Want
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
ADRIENNE RICH

Clay Day Every False History Watches Written
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH

Create Fearfully Impulse Real Silence Terribly Tunnel Voice
Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beyond Daughter Exchanged Female Mother Survival Transmitted Two Verbally
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternatives Challenges Experience Imagination Imagine Question
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
ADRIENNE RICH

Born Each Help Helping Knowing Live Somehow Somewhere Tomorrow
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Danger Present Tense
I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
ADRIENNE RICH

Approve Cherish Children Choice Father Made Mind Wanted
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Birth Code Cultural Giving Law Professional Religious
I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Compost Concern Feel Field Flourish Guess Isolate Need Rich Unheard Writing
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Aak Claim Goes Myself On Touch Vision
The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
ADRIENNE RICH

Androcentric Dependent Foundation Leave Marginal Solipsistic Thinking Tunnel Variable Vision

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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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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Popular Authors

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