No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
ADRIENNE RICHI’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.
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Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
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If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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The revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 RICH -
We have lived with violence far too long.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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I am suspicious – first of all, in myself – of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people’s tendency to … vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other ‘exotic’ ways of understanding.
ADRIENNE RICH