We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
ADRIENNE RICHWhat kind of beast would turn its life into words?
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
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It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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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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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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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 define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
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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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Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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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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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
ADRIENNE RICH