If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
ADRIENNE RICHThe so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
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The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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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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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
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You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
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Any woman’s death diminishes me.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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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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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 [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
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Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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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.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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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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There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
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My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
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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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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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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.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH