When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
ADRIENNE RICHNo one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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To become a politics of asking women’s questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women–not a chosen few–shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.
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For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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And that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
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In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.
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Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH