My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICHThere is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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I don’t want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won’t deal with it.
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Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.
ADRIENNE RICH -
If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
ADRIENNE RICH -
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
ADRIENNE RICH -
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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The marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
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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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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
ADRIENNE RICH