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.
ADRIENNE RICHLying is done with words and also with silence.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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The so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.
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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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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
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It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
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We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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What I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
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I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
ADRIENNE RICH