No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are.
ADRIENNE RICHI’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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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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I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
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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.
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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
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I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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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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A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.
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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
ADRIENNE RICH