Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy will develop new meanings; thinking itself will be transformed. This is where we have to begin.
ADRIENNE RICHIf you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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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To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
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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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If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
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Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
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Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICH