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To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

Adrienne Rich

The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH

Deepest Estrangement Material Most Mutuality Painful
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Artist Channel Clogged Concern Merely Misdirected Song Struggle Temporary
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
ADRIENNE RICH

Count Few Hard Important People Way
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH

Different Guess Mine Sew Skin Stitch Together
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
ADRIENNE RICH

Authorities Authority Certain Face Life Power Prime Rarely Woman
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
ADRIENNE RICH

Liquid Poetry Stone Voice Wear Writing
A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.
ADRIENNE RICH

Collective Consciousness Need Solution Support Value Withdrawal
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

Always Asked Children Come Fear Growing Lest Menses Up Waited Waiting War Women
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
ADRIENNE RICH

Artist Dishonoured Honor Legal People President
What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
ADRIENNE RICH

Beast Kind Life Turn
It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Come Committed Desire Economic Enormous Institution Poetry Require Social
Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
ADRIENNE RICH

Courage Defined Fall Fought Recovery Rose
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Difficulty Further Movement Novelist People Phrases Realize Two Wolf
When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Authority Disequilibrium Mirror Moment Psychic Teacher World
The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Batter Callousness Child Children Exploitation Force Mother Poverty Sickness War
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH

Enough Language Longer Personal

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

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To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence– words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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