It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
ADRIENNE RICHSleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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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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Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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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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There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.
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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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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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Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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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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Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH






