There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICHI 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
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There is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien – and very often they believe themselves superior.
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
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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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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother.
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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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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.
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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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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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The moment of change is the only poem.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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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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They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
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When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
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If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
ADRIENNE RICH