Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
ADRIENNE RICHWomen’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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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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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
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There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
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I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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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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The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
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I 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.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
ADRIENNE RICH