Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
ADRIENNE RICHIt is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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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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TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
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What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
ADRIENNE RICH