A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
ADRIENNE RICHWe may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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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.
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The marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.
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This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
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I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
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Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.
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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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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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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.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH