Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
ADRIENNE RICHThe most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
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False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
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The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.
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An honorable human relationship … is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
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Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
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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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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH