I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
ADRIENNE RICHNo one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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A language is a map of our failures.
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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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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
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It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
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Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
ADRIENNE RICH