What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.
ADRIENNE RICHWe have lived with violence far too long.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
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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.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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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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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
ADRIENNE RICH