What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
ADRIENNE RICHOne 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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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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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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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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It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
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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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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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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
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Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
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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.
ADRIENNE RICH