The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICHWe assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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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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There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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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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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.
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My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
ADRIENNE RICH