We have lived with violence far too long.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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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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In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
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In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth not only children if and as we choose but the visions, and the thinking, necessary to sustain, console and alter human existence-a new relationship to the universe.
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The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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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. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
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“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
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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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This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
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One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.
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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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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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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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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
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And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.
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Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins,
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Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
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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 moment of change is the only poem.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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The password is a flicker of an eyelash.
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A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
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I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
ADRIENNE RICH