A language is a map of our failures.
ADRIENNE RICHThe 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
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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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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.
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It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
ADRIENNE RICH