Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
ADRIENNE RICHMost women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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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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The most important thing a woman can do for another is to illuminate her actual possibilities.
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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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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I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
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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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Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH