I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICHWe have lived with violence far too long.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
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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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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then.
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The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
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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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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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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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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
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Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
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I wanted him [my father] to cherish and approve of me, not as he had when I was a child, but as the woman I was, who had her own mind and had made her own choices.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
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Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn’t themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too “political,” “merely” oral and thus unreliable.
ADRIENNE RICH