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.
ADRIENNE RICHWhite hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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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.
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
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What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
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If, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens.
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I came to explore the wreck.
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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